


love is a verb

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Choice Versus Fate, Except Maybe It Is, F/M, Post Movie, Romance, Set during the movie, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, That's Not How The Force Works, The Force, do not repost to another website
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23515705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: It’s a sign of good fortune to be marked by the Force, a promise that those marked would have love, and all the things that came with it. A happy home, a smiling family. Were Cassian's parents pleased that their youngest child’s soulmark showed up so early? Had they wanted more for him, or even thought much about it beyond the usual curiosity and general low key excitement?He doesn’t really remember, and he supposes it doesn’t matter.--An attempt to reconcile "your soulmate's first words appear on your skin" trope and the idea that soulmates are not found, but made.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus (background)
Comments: 368
Kudos: 428
Collections: Star Wars The Clone Wars





	1. and so

On Fest, stories do not begin with ‘once upon a time,’ and they certainly don’t end with ‘happily ever after.’ Cassian never even hears that phrase until he’s full grown, when he’s too old to believe a perfect happy ending is possible and too worn to care much that it isn’t. On Fest, stories were never such neat contained things anyway, a new start and a resolute end all packaged up in one little neat box, to be opened and closed when needed. No, on Fest, a storyteller always begins a bit in the middle.

_And so – our mother came to this town after her journey from the capital, with little money but great heart._

_And so –our parents’ parents’ parents carved this community from the side of the great glacier, and we remain where their blood and sweat fell, grown from the snow and ice as we are._

Even the old Jedi tales that Cassian vaguely remembers from a long-gone childhood began the same way, a quick clearing of the throat, a waved hand to draw the little ones close, and a quiet voice that he sometimes thinks must have been his mother’s, or perhaps his aunt’s. _And so – Navaar the metalsmith walked that day in the northern hills, until he came to the froze lake where the ice maidens dance._

They all end the same way, too. _And my mother continues_ , the storyteller will say, holding up a holo of an old woman’s lined face next to her own, _as the stories of her children continue, like so._

 _And our ancestors’ great work, their relentless persistence in the face of the great winter, continues_ , a sweep of an arm out towards the audience, _in all of us who live here still, like so._

 _And the ice maiden’s cold blade still cuts on the mountains winds today,_ a gesture to the thick windows, to the snowstorm that rages just beyond the shielded glass, _guarding her beloved Navaar from the fires of the mynocks, like so._

On Fest, all stories are just little pieces of one great story, piling up like the drifts outside, flake upon flake upon flake until they are the mountains that shape and shelter his people.

Cassian loves stories. Or rather, he did, once. Some of his clearest memories of Fest are of him sitting in a warm, crowded kitchen with voices and bodies all around him, safe and loved and a little squashed but never lonely, and that soft clear voice saying _and so._ He likes telling his own little stories, too, a child’s odd and disjointed tales knotted together from things he’s heard or seen. But he remembers that his family laughed and applauded and kissed him when he waved his arms around and tried to carve his own awkward little shapes into the great snow drifts of their spoken history. He remembers the joy of creating his own little narratives, the occasional frustration when a teasing adult would poke a hole in his plotlines or when a snotty cousin would roll their eyes at the characters, the satisfaction of someone calling out the right words at the end, like they did for the real storytellers, _and the story continues, like so._

So when the words appear on his arm shortly after his fifth birthday, he’s reasonably sure that he’s excited about it. _Tell me a story_ flows the words on his upper right arm, written by a neat hand in the tunnel-slang of Festian workers. It feels like a sign, like a promise; he will be a great storyteller someday. He will speak the stories of his people in his native tongue, and they will gather around in the warm, crowded kitchens and laugh and listen and shout along. He likes that part the best, when the audience is allowed to call out the words before the storyteller does, the familiar phrases and jokes running through them all like a line, connecting all the dots. _Tell me a story_ , his soulmate will ask, and Cassian will smile and spread his hands and say, _and so -_

(Cassian wonders sometimes what his family thought of the words on his arm, if they were happy that his soulmate was Festian and spoke the common tongue only found among the miners and the factory builders, the lowly droid coders and plas-steel forgers. Were his parents happy that his soulmate apparently shared his love of stories? He doesn’t remember what _their_ soul-words said, but he knows that his parents had them, a long line of flowing script on his father’s shoulder, short spikey words on his mother’s hand. Not everyone had the marks, although they were relatively common. It’s a sign of good fortune to be marked by the Force, a promise that those marked would have love, and all the things that came with it. A happy home, a smiling family. Were his parents pleased that their youngest child’s soulmark showed up so early? Were they relieved that it meant he would likely stay close to home? Had they wanted more for him, or even thought much about it beyond the usual curiosity and general low key excitement?

He doesn’t really remember, and he supposes it doesn’t matter.)

When he’s six, something odd happens to the words, although he’s too distracted at the time to notice. Fine cracks appear in them, as if the indelible ink staining him from the inside out has begun to dry out, even though the skin beneath is as pliable as any healthy child’s. Cassian _doesn’t_ notice, though, because his father’s blood soaks through the sleeve of his jacket and his shirt and his arm, and when the grown ups come and take the coat away and clean the blood and the tears from him, they don’t remark on the change. He doesn’t look. Doesn’t care.

Cassian fails to notice, or care, for years. When he is twelve, a tall red headed Human with a permanent scowl on his face offers him a better blaster than the broken one he’s been keeping together through careful innovation and sheer stubborn will. Cassian shoots the Stormtroopers chasing the red-headed rebel from thirty meters away with less than five seconds warning, and the red-head makes him an offer. The tall Human doesn’t make a scene of it, doesn’t grandstand or promise Cassian anything. He simply looks at the scrawny, slightly underfed boy and says, “There are more of them out there.”

“There always are,” Cassian studies the offered new blaster with care, paying close attention to where the barrel joins the power pack. His old blaster had an increasingly unstable seam along this point, and he knows from terrible experience that such a seam could make the whole thing blow up in his hand at any random moment. This new blaster that the older rebel is offering is an old model worn from use, but better made than his current scrounged weapon. The rebellion on Fest is not well-funded. He keeps his eyes on the weapon and doesn’t notice when the bitterness creeps into his voice as he repeats the phrase he’s heard more and more from the others in his isolated rebel cell. “There probably always will be.”

“Unless you cut them off at the source,” the red-head says, and that makes Cassian’s head snap up.

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then the red-head holds the new blaster a little higher. “Captain Draven. You the Andor boy I’ve been told about?”

Cassian shrugs, because how would _he_ know what anyone’s been telling this off-worlder with three blasters, two knives, and a thousand secrets?

“Right,” the red-head, Captain Draven, grunts and runs a gloved hand over his face and tosses the new blaster gently. Cassian snatches it from the air and immediately checks that the clip is fully charged. It is. “I’m leaving in the morning to find that source. Or to find at least one of them. You interested, Andor, or not?”

And so Cassian Andor joins the Alliance to Restore the Republic, a name that makes him laugh a little when he hears it in full the first time. He continues working with Draven, and doesn’t notice until almost a month after he arrives on Yavin that the dark words on his arm have paled almost to a dull grey, cracked and dull like thick ice under his skin, like the metalsmith Navaar under the frozen lake, like his father’s face in the ashes of the Carida streets. _Tell me a story_ , his mark whispers in dry words that look ready to flake away from his skin at any moment. (No one on Fest speaks the tunnel-slang anymore, the miners and the droid-builders and the factory hands all killed, run off, or forced to learn the Basic language and punished if caught speaking anything else. Some days Cassian wonders if he even still remembers it himself. Would he even recognize it, if someone else spoke to him in that old dialect?)

He runs a hand over the cracked letters; he is mildly surprised when they don’t vanish in a cloud of dust.

Then he puts his coat back on, and he doesn’t look at the desecrated soulmark again. Occasionally, he is called on to cover it with a skin-tone dye when thick jackets and shirts won’t do, but unless he has to disguise it for a mission, he forgets about it. He tells stories enough, that’s true, new names and childhoods and job skills all falling off his tongue, personas he invents that have no real beginning and are unceremoniously discarded when he’s done with them. He never hears any voice say the words that lie dead and cold under his skin, not in Basic or Bocce or Alderaanian, and certainly not in the old Fest tunnel-slang. But he _is_ asked to tell story after story by strangers for years, always with lives hanging in the balance, always with capture, torture, or death hovering just around the corner.

He doesn’t sweep his arms so much and he rarely smiles, but the world demands stories of him, and so Cassian obliges.

* * *

Jyn’s parents teach her to read in Basic first. Her mother doesn’t attempt to teach her Arianic, the language of Lyra’s home planet, until Jyn is almost seven. Part of the problem is that Jyn is not good at the more rigid forms of study; sitting still and picking through letters with Mama sits more poorly with her restless spirit than the games Papa invents to teach her science and math. She would rather look at the bright holos showing space routes and star types than flip through the old cracked datapads filled with words from a planet she’s never been. She would rather sneak through the grubby windows of their little farm and run amok in the rain and wind than recite participles or possessives. Jyn is a clever child, there is never any doubt of that, but she’s never been particularly studious. Mama even says once, despairingly, that if it weren’t for the soulwords, Jyn wouldn’t have bothered to learn reading at all.

Maybe she’s right, although Jyn stubbornly refuses to admit it. Of all the words Mama makes her squint at on the flickering screens, all the shapes and letters she must scratch out with her oversized stylus, she likes the ones that grow down her left shin the best. They are in Basic, true, but Jyn’s never seen letters that twine and wrap like vines around her bony leg. Papa calls it “script” or, sometimes “calligraphy,” although Mama showed Jyn some pictures of calligraphy from Aria Prime and it’s pretty but it’s not like the organic shapes that stretch and flow on her skin.

 _We all make our choices_ , whisper the words on her skin, and Jyn traces her fingers over them and wonders who will say them. She loves that the words seem to keep growing with her, which she doesn’t realize is happening until she’s seven and she sees a strange, wonky sort of scar on Mama’s arm one hot summer day when Mama ties back the sleeves of her robe. The scar is such a funny shape that Jyn spends several minutes amusing herself guessing what odd thing might have made it, until Mama asks her what she’s staring at.

“What made that scar, Mama?” Jyn reaches up and traces the awkwardly curving mark on Mama’s upper arm. “Was it a wampa? Or, or the Toothy Tooka?” Jyn loves the stories about the Toothy Tooka; she likes the idea of a smile that can exist even when the rest of the person isn’t around. It’s one of the few books that Mama doesn’t have to force her to read, so she’s got it memorized by heart.

“No, Jyn,” Mama glances at her arm and shrugs, her focus still intent on the seedlings that she’s has been trying to nurture in their tiny, grubby greenhouse. From the expression on her face, this year’s attempt isn’t much better than last year. “It was just some doorframe or other that I scraped against as a child. It’s just stretched out and warped like that because I got it when I was very small, and when my arm grew, it pulled at the scar tissue.”

Jyn considers this for a moment. “Scars don’t grow?”

“Not naturally,” Mama shakes her head, and then looks up sharply from her drooping seedlings as Jyn’s tentative voice registers with her. “Why?”

Jyn shifts her weight, points at her leg. “Papa says I was born with the soulwords.”

“You were.” Mama’s eyes narrow, the way they do when she’s matching up Jyn’s promise that she absolutely did not sneak off to play outside with the mud caked on her shoes.

“But I was smaller when I was born,” Jyn picks her way forward carefully, because she’s not entirely sure if she’s understood all of this correctly, or if Mama’s narrow eyes means that she’s about to be in trouble for something. Jyn’s used to being in trouble, but usually she knows that she _earned_ it.

“And thank the Force for that,” Mama says dryly, and then her eyebrow raises and Jyn feels a little relieved as the narrow-eyed look changes to a softer, more understanding one. “Your mark hasn’t warped, though, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“But will it?” Jyn lefts her foot to rub her marked shin against her other leg, frowning as she considers the weird shape of Mama’s scar. She doesn’t like the idea of her vine words growing bent and strange just because she’s bigger.

“It’s not very likely,” Mama says after a moment, a strange note that makes Jyn feel uncomfortable again, like she’s flirting with trouble and doesn’t even know it. “Force bonded marks like that usually stay with you through your life.” Abruptly, she turns back to her seedlings, and there’s a faint scowl on her face that definitely feels like trouble.

Jyn’s instincts tell her to let it go, that it’s a good time to run for the back fields and maybe squish some mud in her toes or go looking for more weed-skippers or catch frogs…but she finds herself shifting awkwardly in place in the greenhouse instead, watching her mother sort through rows of brownish sprouts with sharp movements. “Usually?” She ventures at last.

Mama pauses again, but she doesn’t turn back to look at Jyn this time. “Usually,” she says at last.

She probably shouldn’t, but Jyn plunges on anyway. “But not _always?_ ”

Mama swallows, her eyes narrow again. “Sometimes,” she starts. Stops. Shakes her head. “Sometimes they fade,” she says at last. “If the other person…goes away.” She turns her back fully on Jyn now, working on another row of seedlings even though Jyn’s almost sure she hasn’t finished the first.

Her words don’t make sense, though, and Jyn’s curiosity wins out over her good sense, because she still doesn’t turn around and leave Mama to whatever bad mood has suddenly overtaken her. “Goes away? But we haven’t even met. How can they go away before they,” she struggles for the words, then settles on, “before they get to me?”

Mama’s voice crackles a little around the edges. “If they die, Jyn,” she turns around and strides the short distance between them, kneeling down and putting her dirt-crusted hand on Jyn’s shoulder. “The words will go away if the person who is meant to say them dies. But other than that, you are unable to – “ she cuts off as if she has said something she did not intend, and her lips thin. “You will carry them all your life,” she finishes in a softer, more normal tone.

Jyn nods, not entirely whether or not she is in trouble after all.

“It’s not something you have to worry about,” Mama tells her, and her hands are dirty but warm as she brushes some of Jyn’s messy hair back into her braid. “Now, go and play. I have to finish with the seedlings or we will have nothing to eat next winter, hm?”

Jyn nods and hugs Mama’s neck, and then runs out into the back fields like she wanted to, before. Except she doesn’t squish mud or chase the little chirping lizards or anything; she finds one of the big rocks that Papa says are too much trouble to move, and she climbs up and sits for awhile in the soft, wet breeze of Lah’mu, rubbing her hand down her shin as she thinks.

She decides that she likes knowing her words will keep growing as she does, twisty vine letters that wrap around her leg like a comforting hand. She really doesn’t like the thought of them just…vanishing one day, like a weed ripped out by the root or a vine withered against it’s trellis. But Mama said “usually” when she said they would stay all her life, so that’s pretty good, right? Vaguely, Jyn recalls Papa’s last lessons mentioning statistics and how numbers could predict things happening or not happening if you only know all the parts that make them up. She resolves to ask for more lessons on that, so she can figure out the numbers for her vines staying. It makes her feel much better to know that her words will stay big and green and pretty on her skin, so she gets off the old rock and goes looking for mud-skippers after all.

She catches five, and even manages to get three of them all the way home, but the biggest one accidentally gets loose in the house and even though she gets in trouble for it later, Papa and Mama and Jyn have so much fun chasing it down that she’s forgiven before bed time. In the excitement of the mud-skippers and then her scolding and subsequent lesson on proper animal handling, Jyn forgets about statistics and vine words and _usually_.

She doesn’t think of statistics or faded words again until more than a year later, when a big man in armor drapes a heavy, work cloak over her thin shoulders and tells her she cannot go home again. “But, Mama – “

“She is gone away,” Saw cuts off her question before it can fully burst from her lips. This is the only time he softens the truth for her in the next eight years, she will realize many years later; it is the only time he does not call Death by it’s name. “She has…gone away to the Force.”

It hardly matters though. In Jyn’s head, she hears _if they die, Jyn_ and _you will carry them with you all your life_ and suddenly she wants to – she _needs_ to see the words on her leg, her soulwords, vine-words, wrapped around her calf from ankle to knee in flowing, twisty letters, not uprooted, not withered, she needs to see -

Saw frowns at her scrabbling, watching as she leans down and claws at her muddy trouser leg with mud-stained fingers. His eyebrows lift as the first few dark strokes appear around her ankle, but what his face does when Jyn pulls the trouser all the way above her knee, she doesn’t know. She’s too busy staring at her leg, her words.

They are still there, not vanished like Mama over the hills, like Papa in the shadows of their farm (Jyn saw the smoke as Saw’s shuttle lifted off. She’s not a baby. She knows there is no farm, now.) The words are there, but her vine has become…thicker. Harsher, somehow. The flowing words are written in heavier strokes, like someone went over them with a slightly bigger bristle brush. Worse, they seem to have grown small, sharp points that prickle like tiny needle thorns out of the curved letters. _We all make our choices,_ her words snarl up and around her shin, digging into her flesh with little hooks.

( _Trust the Force, Jyn,_ Mama’s voice is sharp against her hair even as her hands press the kyber necklace gently on Jyn’s neck, before she turns and runs back over the hills.)

 _(Everything I do, I do to protect you_ , Papa’s voice scratches against her cheek as rough as his beard, before he sets her down and steps back into the shadows of the farm.)

“Wise words,” Saw’s voice cuts through the grating in her ears, through the scratching, through the prickle of thorns on her skin. “But it will be best to cover them, child.”

Her words are all wrong. Is it because Mama and Papa are gone? Is it because she sat in the dark for so long and the vines grew ugly and cruel, poisoned with water rot like the northern wheat field last summer? Is it because…but if her person was dead, wouldn’t the words just go away? Jyn considers, in a fuzzy disinterested way, that perhaps her person has also just lost their Mama, their Papa. Perhaps there is an echoing scratchy scream in their own head, too, and so their words are scratching and snarling on Jyn’s skin. Or maybe it’s just her, grown ugly and thorny already in those long hours in the dark.

It makes as much sense as anything else.

“Jyn,” she says suddenly, and her voice is also rough, grating in her throat, dry and sore from disuse. “I’m Jyn. Not,” she shoves the trouser leg back down, not caring that the muddy material is cold and damp against her skin. “Not _child._ ”

“Jyn, then,” Saw repeats gravely.

“Jyn Erso,” she says, but even as she says it she knows it’s wrong, somehow. Wrong like her soulwords. Wrong like the smoke over the farm. Wrong like the too-big string of Mama’s kyber around her thin neck, wrong like the too-empty space where Mama and Papa were supposed to be.

“No,” Saw sits heavily next to her and pulls the cloak back up over her shoulders. “Not that, Jyn. Not that, ever again.”

She nods. She understands. She promised she would.


	2. what's said it said (what's held back is lost)

When he is nineteen (or perhaps twenty, when was his real birthday again?), he goes to put the skin paints on his forearm and realizes for the first time that the words have cracked so badly that they are barely legible now. He can still see it if he squints, the faint but distinct pattern of slanted Festian letters forming tunnel-slang words. _Tell me a story_ his skin whispers, and unbidden he thinks _and so – the man wore a name that wasn’t his and laughed at jokes that made him sick, and even now he is a liar –_

His stomach rolls, his jaw clenches, and Cassian shakes his head viciously to clear away the sudden mental image of a town carved into the side of a glacier, of a woman who was probably his aunt sweeping her hands out towards the frost-rimmed window.

They are probably dead, his soulmate. If soulmates even really exist, if they aren’t just another story people tell to try and make sense of the senseless. Cassian doesn’t really believe in the Force; from what he’s seen, there is no grand plan in the endless labyrinthine twists of a life in the galaxy. No, the only things that matters, the only things that are _real_ in this world are the tiny kindnesses and fathomless cruelties of the people who live in it. Even if he did have the time and energy to spare for Fate and Force, he figures that his soulmate probably died on Fest when he was a child. He knows that soulwords are supposed to vanish when the ‘mate dies and the words are doomed to remain unspoken, but it seems that part of the story was also not entirely true. He desperately wishes that it _were_ true, wishes that the ugly grey not-scars would just clear away like clouds after a storm and let him get on with his life. He wishes he could stop remembering how much he has lost every time his sleeve rides up, that he could stop hating what he sees when he looks at any part of himself.

Then he stops wishing, because the galaxy does not care about what people _want_ , only what they _do_. The things Cassian does now leave no room for soulmarks, or the promises of soulmarks. There will be no happy home, no smiling family. Not for him, anyway. But if he does what the Alliance asks (if he does _enough_ ) perhaps these things _will_ exist for others in the galaxy. It’s an abstract idea, a thin and distant hope, but it’s bright enough, worthy enough, beautiful enough to make it matter.

So he pushes the unruly, unhelpful stories of soulmarks firmly and completely out of his head (it takes an admirably short period of time, and damnably little effort). He swipes the flesh-colored dye down his arm to cover the cracked grey words, and goes back to the war.

It’s easier that way.

* * *

By the time Jyn is twenty, her soulmark has grown into a wild thicket across her leg, the curved letters bristling with jagged greenish-brown thorns. It’s getting harder and harder to pick out the words buried under the thorns, although Jyn knows the shape of them so well that her eyes trace the twisting letters perfectly anyway. Every time she looks at it (she tries not to look), she can hear them like a growl in the back of her mind, like a curse being spit at her by an angry stranger. _We all make our choices._

She stopped listening for anyone to say the words a long time ago, but she finds herself thinking them from time to time. A Partisan tries to turn Saw in to the Empire on Onderon, and gets a blaster bolt to the face for his treason (he should have known better than to use a Partisan coded comm to send Imperial codes). A pirate gang raids one of Saw’s cadre cells in Wrea, and the Partisans wipe them from the galactic map (they should have known who they were messing with before they opened fire on a Partisan convoy).

She thinks that she is Saw’s best lieutenant, his most valuable warrior, his beloved child, and finds herself alone on Tamsye Prime at the age of sixteen (she should have known, she should have known, _she should have known_ ).

Everybody makes their own choices. Jir’it chooses to turn on Saw. The Black Star pirates choose to attack the heavily armed convoy. Saw chooses to dump her in a bunker in the middle of a war zone.

Jyn chooses to survive anyway.

It’s not the easier choice. The easier choice would be to let the Empire find her. The easier choice would be to join some gang and wind up as a gang-chief’s battle fodder. Or it would be to let the pirates or mercs she runs with shoot her in the back to avoid paying her share. Or maybe it would be to just turn her vibroblade around and let the universe have the death it so clearly wants from her.

It’s not the easier choice, to raise her chin and grit her teeth and keep living even when everything and everyone would be happier if she died. But it’s the choice she makes.

She wears thick trousers and reinforced boots, and she doesn’t try to read the thorny words in her skin. She doesn’t listen for them on anyone’s lips, doesn’t think she’d stop and answer even if she did hear someone say them. She doesn’t need anyone to tell her that she has no control over anyone else’s choices, to tell her that she has only herself and her own decisions to make.

She _knows_.

* * *

They bring in the daughter as soon as the Pathfinder team lands on Yavin IV. Cassian doesn’t get a lot of warning that she’s arrived, just a quick ping on his comm from Kay. The message is coded in the special cipher that only Cassian and K2SO can read, and Kay’s taken the trouble to add in two extra layers of encryption that take Cassian almost five minutes to break through. By the time he’s decoded the comm text ( _we are back_ , the text reads, and Cassian makes a mental note to talk to Kay about the difference between _security_ and _excessive paranoia_ ), someone has already commed up to Draven to inform him that the prisoner is three minutes away from Command.

Cassian moves quickly, settling himself to the side of the Command Center against an unused console, crossing his arms and stilling his excess movements. He doesn’t know yet what kind of persona he will need when this new mark is marched in. So for now, he will make himself neutral, a blank slate with a dozen possible opening lines queued behind his teeth. He makes his face relaxed, bored, and tilts his head back as if he’s so uninvolved in proceedings that he's considering taking a quick nap. He knows from experience that his body language and facial expression combined with his average looks and bland brown clothes will turn him damn near invisible to anyone not specifically looking for him. It gets even easier when Mon Mothma sweeps in moments later, her fluttering white robes and silver Senatorial chain glinting in the weak lights of Command. Sure enough, when the armed guard lead the daughter in, her wary eyes go immediately to the softly-glowing Senator. It gives him time to evaluate her, to note the wary set of her shoulders, the grim line of her jaw, the way her eyes dart around the room marking exits and potential cover.

Cassian has read every piece of information he could get on the daughter. _Erso’s_ daughter, the last viable route that the Empire has to a weapon that makes the Analysis department wring their hands anxiously and the senior agents in Intelligence pace through the temple halls like an axe hangs over their heads. She’s a criminal, an opportunist merc, a loner, and perilous with a weapon (although that last part is based more on hearsay from various other thieves, criminals, and mercs that he talked to as he hunted through the stars for her). She grew up in a rebel group increasingly known throughout the galaxy for it's brutality. She’s spent the last six months in a high-security Imperial work prison, her wrists are still in shackles, and even from halfway across the room Cassian can see how her rough clothes hang off her underfed frame.

So when she raises her chin and speaks to the leaders of the Alliance like she’s a general meeting them on her own terms, like she has some kind of choice to walk away from this table if she doesn’t like the bargain they offer, Cassian finds himself mildly impressed.

He can’t afford to let her think she’s got an out, though. Not with what’s on the line. If she thinks she can bargain and stall, or even slip away without giving them what they need, then Cassian needs to disabuse her of that notion sooner rather than later. When Mothma turns and gestures to him, introduces him to the daughter (with his _true_ name - he almost winces at that even though he knew it was coming), he strides forward and looms over her chair. He’s already taller than her, but standing this close while she’s seated with her shackled hands in her lap is a minor power play; it highlights how little control she has right now, forces her to acknowledge the imbalance between them whether she likes it or not.

Her mouth thins as she looks up at him, and he can see recognition in her eyes (which, he notes for no reason at all, are a startling green). She knows exactly what he’s doing, and why. Her filth-encrusted fingers curl into fists against her rough trousers, a move that twists the shackles on her wrists just enough that he can see the Imperial stamp on them peeking out from under the edges of her stained sleeves.

Cassian swallows back the sudden surge of bile in his throat and focuses on his mission. Too late to change the tone now, she is defensive and cagey so he has chosen confrontational and demanding. It’s not going to make them friends, but it’s the best path forward that he can see. He’s done worse things than this for less dangerous objectives. So he shoves the visceral reaction back, hunts through the opening lines set up in a row in his mind, finds the one that fits best with his current play, and throws it at her. “When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

She glares up at him, fists so tight on her legs that the shackles clink softly against one another, betraying the tiny tremor in her wrists. “Fifteen years ago,” she snarls at him through gritted teeth, as if even that tiny scrap of information has been wrenched from her. She won’t give him anything without a fight. The harder he pushes her, the tighter she will build her defenses.

If Cassian had the time, he would have done all this differently. If he had the option, he would find something less ugly than this coercion. She’s a thief and a con artist, wholly interested in her own survival and little else, but he’s worked with worse before. He knows how to charm even that sort of selfish fool, and if he only had the time, he would have found the right story to tell her to make her, if not a rebel herself, at least an ally. Someone like her, fierce and independent and self-absorbed – yes, he would have brought her in as a contractor, a mercenary, something that would allow her to feel like she had agency in their partnership. He would smile (not too much, not too familiar), and he’d play a polite, competent business liaison and offer her the courtesy of professional respect. She’d be suspicious but equally professional, and he could downplay the Alliance’s desperation while appealing to her hatred of the Empire. As soon as he had some surface-level, business-only kind of trust, he would talk to her about her father and find the lever he needed to pull to make her care about finding him, be it love or vengeance or just a need for closure.

He certainly wouldn’t have dragged her into a room full of strangers with shackles on her wrists and forced her to recognize how little choice she has in any of it. He can’t see that story ending in anything other than a knife in his back (or a blaster bolt in hers, if he has to).

But Cassian _doesn’t_ have the time, and his options are increasingly ugly when he lays them out in his head. Whatever Galen Erso is working on, production has ramped up to almost a frenzied degree. This pilot that defected to Saw Gerrera might not survive much longer to tell what he knows. Something terrible is festering out there in the void, and the Alliance – the free galaxy – might not survive it if he doesn’t act now. Shackles and threats and power plays are all he has, so he uses them.

It’s not the worst thing he’s ever done.

* * *

The rebel guarding her takes off her shackles with barely concealed reluctance. He's about her age, Human, dark hair buzzed short and a heavy leather jacket with multiple pockets that Jyn envies immediately. No blaster or knife on him anywhere she can pick out, but a shock truncheon looped in his belt opposite the shackles and two communicators visible on his belt and in an inner jacket pocket. He has an empty blaster holster tucked under his jacket to the right, and he touches it twice absently. Jyn decides this all means he is probably not typically a base guard, but a soldier who is hanging around the base at the moment and got pulled into babysitting duty.

He loops the shackles into his belt and flicks his light grey eyes flick up and down her filthy clothes. Then he sighs, matches her wary expression with a cold frown of his own, and jerks his head down the hall. Jyn stares at him for a few seconds, unblinking, mouth flat, just to watch him squirm. Then she turns away and refuses to acknowledge him as best she can. He leads her to a small empty barracks without a word spoken, stands outside the communal ‘fresher while she takes the first sonic shower she’s had in ages. She’s so filthy that she has to take her clothes off to hold them up to the sonic individually, shaking dirt and sweat and dried crusts of blood from all the little folds. The privacy curtain on the shower stall doesn’t quite go all the way to the ground, so she stands well back from it and keeps her marked leg against the wall. She’s not sure anyone would recognize the tangled briars on her shin as a soulmark, but she’s learned not to risk it.

Strangely, the sonic energy buzzing along her bare skin seems to irritate the thorns, making her leg prickle and itch in a way it hasn’t since she was a child. She glares at it to no avail. Outside the shower curtain, the guard coughs impatiently, the faint clink of the shackles on his belt swinging as he moves. Jyn leans down and scrubs angry nails against her overgrown mark, until the itching subsides. The guard clears his throat, a not so subtle reminder, perhaps even a command. She's clearly wasting his valuable time, the _Alliance's_ valuable time, and what, he wants her to repent? Hurry up to please her new masters? The simmering anger in her guts snaps into clearer focus, a target to latch on to at last, and Jyn almost snaps out _I didn’t sign up for your damn rebellion._ The words perch on her tongue like eager hounds waiting to be unleashed, growling in her throat. This man knows nothing of her except that she was marched into command in chains and interrogated by people he probably thinks of as great heroes. And she didn't exactly walk out of there with a new rank badge and a starbird pin on her shirt. She's nothing to him but a skinny, unpleasant criminal sullenly doing what she's told. He's nobody to her, either, but there's a sense that she could force some kind of confrontation easily enough, make at least this one rebel stop glowering at her like she's everything wrong with galaxy. If he tries to loom over her like that spy, _this_ time she could retaliate. A good kick in the gut was a great way to knock the self-righteous starch out of someone.

At the last second she bites the snarl back. In the back of her mind, the dark-eyed spy growls _because he’s a cog in the Imperial war machine_ like she ought to be ashamed, and she's never going to change his mind no matter how many rebels she beats into the hard duracrete floor. Not that she gives a damn what any of them think, of course. The much more relevant reason for her silence is that she’s currently naked, weaponless, and exhausted from months in a grey hell. The last thing she needs is to pick a fight with some karking laserbrain with a shock truncheon, no matter how the scorn on his face rankles. So she shuts her jaw and doesn’t provoke the guard, and while he still grunts and shifts his weight and probably glares at the shower curtain, he doesn’t speak either.

Better that way.

When the sonic buzzes her clothes clean and Jyn almost looks decent enough to belong in this ragtag army of idealists, the guard takes her to the quartermaster station and lets her pluck a couple small items from their half-empty storage spaces. She grabs a scarf and a pair of less-frayed gloves, a thin jacket and a pair of boots with no holes in the leather, and when the guard glances away for a moment, she slips a pipe truncheon into her shirt front and wraps an extra belt around her waist. She can convert the second belt to a holster for the truncheon later. The last thing she swipes is a pair of thick leather bootlaces – her kyber necklace cord is beginning to fray and she wants to replace it. She makes a show of holding the laces against her new-old boots, though, so it looks to the guard like she’s just getting greedy and taking a spare. She keeps the crystal tucked down in her shirt; she’ll replace the cord when she’s somewhere away from prying eyes.

The guard doesn’t let her anywhere near the weapons lockers, but that’s fine. If there’s anything Jyn’s good at, its arming herself. She’ll find something soon.

The guard gets impatient again while she’s wrapping the scarf and buckling her second belt (which she’s sure he sees as more greed, but that’s fine, she doesn’t care). He taps his own truncheon against his leg and glowers at her, then looks meaningfully at the chrono on the wall of the storage space. Jyn ignores him; he’s going for ‘intimidation through silence,’ which is a good move considering he’s about twice her mass and reasonably muscled. But Jyn perfected that technique ages ago, and she also has already marked the defensive holes in the guard’s stance, the weakness in the way he holds the truncheon. She could disarm and incapacitate him in two moves, maybe three.

Which would just land her back in a cell somewhere, or shot through the head, so she does the only thing she can, and ignores him.

Jyn sets her jaw and moves through the rebel base like she doesn’t give a damn about any of it, not the armed guard glaring at her back, not the ache of her raw wrists, not the weight of her father’s name (not her father, her father is dead) hanging over her head.

And certainly not the scraping sensation in her leg, where brownish-green thorns scratch and bite at her skin like they are trying to get her attention.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (....did anyone guess why Jyn's soulmark was reacting so fiercely in that last scene? There was totally a reason for it.)


	3. distance and lines

“That,” K2SO says, “will be trouble.”

Cassian reflects briefly that when he first found Kay, the droid had a voice box capable of voicing roughly three hundred words and almost no capacity for inflection. Due to all of Cassian’s careful programming additions - and Kay’s tendency to browse the holonet and download new sound files for his audial processor – Kay has developed an entire range of verbal expressions that no KX unit probably ever dreamed. For example, all KX droids can sound appropriately ominous, given their size and intended purpose, but only Kay can slide that particular edge of disapproval into his words.

It doesn’t help that this time, as he turns and sees who is walking across the hangar towards his ship, Cassian wholeheartedly agrees with Kay's assessment.

The unlucky Pathfinder who got slapped with guard duty brings the daughter to Cassian's ship about fifteen minutes later than Cassian ordered. Judging by his face, the Pathfinder’s taking every one of those minutes as a personal affront to his honor. Pathfinders can be uptight about mission objectives in their own way. Or perhaps the Pathfinder just considers this guard mission beneath him. But the Alliance is stretched thin (Cassian knows this better than most, and wishes he didn’t) and everyone has to play their part and then some, like it or not.

Cassian waves the guard off with as neutral an expression as he can manage as the daughter – Jyn Erso – marches unceremoniously up the launch pad and leans into the open cargo hatch as if she does this sort of thing every day. She has no pack that he can see, but she busies herself with what gear she has apparently scrounged. That works for Cassian, because he can see Draven summoning him from across the launch pad.

Draven gives Cassian quiet instructions at odds with the orders from Mothma. Cassian bites back the bitter smile; _stretched thin_ , indeed. But he nods.

Everyone has to play their part, like it or not.

And so, three hours after he ordered the shackles taken from her wrists, Cassian finds himself standing over her again in the bay of his U-Wing. But this time her wrists are free, there is a blaster (his blaster) in her hands, and she…doesn’t point it at him. Doesn’t even raise it. She raises her chin and waits like a lothal-tiger for him to react to this new twist in the tale.

Yesterday she was rotting in an Imperial hell-pit. This morning she sat chained and helpless in Alliance Command. Ten minutes ago she marched in front of an armed and pissed off Pathfinder like he was her bodyguard and not her warden. Now she faces Cassian like a general bargaining on the other side of the table where either of them could walk away if they don’t like the terms.

Aside from himself, he’s never seen someone re-write their own story quite so fast.

“Trust goes both ways,” she tells him, and Cassian knows in his gut that if he tries to take the blaster from her, if he tries to force her to cower beneath his shadow again, then he is no better than the Empire he despises.

Cassian turns his back and waits a moment to see if she puts a bolt through it. He’s not sure what to think when she doesn’t.

* * *

“Would you trade that necklace for a glimpse of your future?”

Jyn whirls towards the man who improbably grins at her face. Improbable, because his eyes are clouded over a sightless blue, his head titled at a slightly _off_ angle as he turns up to her, as if he thinks she’s standing one step to the left of her actual position. And yet, he is undeniably looking directly at her, all the same. “Yes,” he says over the chatter of the crowd around them, his grin widening as she stares, “I am talking to you.”

Jyn assesses him: average height and build, short cropped dark hair and some sort of faded and threadbare black robe, holding a hefty staff over his shoulder, the staff tipped with metal (tipped with _kyber_ , she’s not sure how she knows there is kyber under that metal cap but she is as certain of it as the sun), a beggar’s bowl sitting by his booted feet. And yet, he does not seem like a beggar, or if he is then he is the king of the beggars, sitting regally in the middle of his bustling red-stone court and surveying all he commands with a knowing smile.

“I am Chirrut Imwe,” the beggar king announces grandly, and then cocks his head and makes an elegant gesture with one hand, inviting her to respond.

In the narrow, dark alley about ten steps from his back, Jyn spots a looming threat of a man, heavy armor and heavier cannon, peering at her with inscrutable dark eyes under thick black hair. He makes no menacing gestures and his expression is impassive – but Jyn knows a guard when she sees one. No wonder the beggar king sits so at ease. That repeater cannon could level half this market square before she could pull her blaster.

Jyn catches the guard’s eye, lifts her chin, lets him know she sees him. In contrast, he tilts his own chin down, a tiny movement, an acknowledgement. He sees her, too.

Jyn presses her lips together and dismisses him, turning back to the blind beggar king. “How do you know I’m wearing a necklace?”

“For that answer, you must pay,” his grin turns sly; he taps the wooden end of his staff lightly against the bowl. “Or perhaps a trade? An answer for an answer?”

“I don’t want my future told,” Jyn says flatly; however charming the con man, she’s not about to show his large friend where she keeps her credits. Or rather, where she _would_ have kept them, if she kriffing had any at the moment. Jyn makes a mental note to slip a hand into a few pockets while Cassian is gone. If she survives meeting Saw, then she will need something to start with after the spy is gone.

“Would you prefer your past? Very well. Your answer for mine, my friend – why have you stretched the line so thin?”

"The line." She keeps her voice flat, not really questioning, not betraying interest in what he says. If this is some elaborate con, he's pretty good, because she can't see where he's going at all.

To her shock, the blind man flicks his staff out too fast for her to dodge, and taps the kyber-tipped end against her marked leg. The staff is there and gone before she can react, a gentle but direct touch to the heart of the tangled briar on her skin. Jyn startles back, and her leg flares with an urgent sort of itch, something spiny wound around her shin and digging in. “I don’t – I haven't _stretched_ anyth – I haven’t even _met_ – “ A flash of panic courses through her belly, followed almost immediately by burning anger and a familiar raw sensation in her chest, like the edges of a half-healed wound tugged painfully apart.

“Haven’t you?” The beggar king rocks back on his dusty throne and taps his staff gently against his leg. “Strange. I had thought it was the kyber, one kind of resonance overpowering the other, but,” he shrugs. “Perhaps not.”

Jyn glowers, caught wrong-footed and confused for reasons she can’t quite decide. How did this stranger know about her mother’s necklace, about her tangled mark? Someone in the busy crowd jostles against her back and she instinctively surges away from them, a move that takes her a step closer to Chirrut. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the big guard in the alley lift his shaggy head, a hound scenting the wind, watchful and ready. She stills herself immediately, one hand checking that her blaster is still there, the other rising to the stone pendant tucked under her shirt. As her fingers close over the reassuring shape, she notices for the first time that there are neat dark shapes marching up the side of the beggar king’s neck. They look similar to the Jedhan script she sees painted or chiseled onto the older surfaces of this city, or cheaply printed on the tourist-trap souvenirs here and there. The words are neat and blocky, a thick black line of characters running from just behind Chirrut’s left ear and disappearing under his collar. As if he knows she’s looking, he tilts his head to the side and in the fading evening light, she can just make out what looks like another mark beneath the black words. The same characters, written in the same hand, but the ink is reddish, and faint. It’s like his mark has a shadow behind it, a reddish imprint set just a few millimeters to the side. It might just be a tattoo, but somehow Jyn knows it’s not.

The anger in her belly fades back from flames to coals, and for the first time in years she finds herself…curious.

“May you walk in the Force,” Chirrut says thoughtfully.

“Right,” Jyn shakes her head, because of course she wasn’t going to ask him about it. That would be ridiculous, and she had better things to do than indulge in _curiosity._ This whole conversation is pointless, and dangerous. She needs to go find Cassian, or at least go wait for him somewhere less...exposing.

“That’s what it says,” Chirrut reaches up one hand and taps the words on his neck gently. Behind him, the big guard adjusts his cannon in his arms. “ _May you walk in the Force._ Temple acolytes are taught to always greet each other for the first time with these words. It discourages…preferences.”

“Jyn!” Cassian’s voice cuts through the crowd, and Jyn whips around, startled less by his interruption and more by the realization that she had been about to ask the Guardian – no, the _beggar,_ there was no proof he was really some mythical monk or whatever he was dressed as – she had been about to ask this stranger something stupid and dangerous and likely to get her killed. She’s suddenly angry all over again; look at her sitting here in a marketplace letting a charming street-con build a rapport, dangerously close to spilling her most personal secrets to him while a rebel spy watches her from the crowds. Wobani must have turned her brains to mush.

“Let’s go,” Cassian appears next to her, his hand on her arm, and Jyn lets him pull her away from her near-mistake. He looks intent, moving with purpose towards a nearby side street, so she figures he’s found something important. She doesn't shake off his arm, letting him half-tow her through the flow of pilgrims and locals. She doesn’t want to lose him now, not if he’s found a path to Saw, to her –

Well, she doesn’t want to lose him now that they might know where to go.

Behind them, the Guardian raises his voice over the crowd, “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber!”

"Who are they?" She asks, almost more to herself than the spy. She mildly surprised that he even hears her, let alone answers.

“Guardians of the Whills,” Cassian murmurs, and Jyn shouldn’t be able to pick out his voice so clearly over the crowd. “Protectors of the Kyber Temple, except there’s nothing left to protect, so now they just cause trouble for everybody.”

“You seem tense all of the sudden,” Jyn eyes him carefully, noting that his normal grim reserve seems to have tightened into a darting watchfulness that makes her own jaw clench, her back prickle with the weight of unknown eyes. She sweeps a search pattern to the side, is pleased when she notes Cassian making an identical sweep to the opposite side. When they both start to move forward again, they instinctively angle for the same gap in the crowd ahead, keeping the vendor stands and stalls between themselves and the main road where she can see Imperial hover-tank tracks embedded in the stone and packed dirt. He doesn't shove her with his hip or elbow, but she feels him shift towards the side to guide them around a chirping group of Toribota clansman. She spots a Snivvian pickpocket working the crowd to their right and shifts to walk around the little thief's chosen turf, not interested in breaking some kid's fingers today. Cassian turns with her and doesn't say a thing, although she's certain that he can't have seen the short, furry threat from his angle. He simply follows her lead, as she has been more or less following his. Professional courtesy, perhaps, or at least a recognition of her skills and experience.

She doesn’t trust him, but it’s…nice to work with someone who knows what he’s doing in a dangerous environment. He tends to scan high more than low, the bias of a sniper (or a tall man), so Jyn keeps her focus calibrated mostly at street level to compensate. The packed streets force them to move in an arrhythmic series of starts and stops, darting forward when the flow is with them, cutting to the side or halting entirely when the press pushes them in the wrong direction.

At a particularly large crossroads, they are forced to stop and shuffle back into the crowd to make way for a patrol of Stormtroopers passing through, two Humans in orange flight suits trudging at blaster-point in front of them. Jyn presses closer to Cassian to avoid being shoved up against a crimson-robed Lorrdian, turning her head into his shoulder defensively when the tall, slender monk swings their incense-burner uncomfortably close to her face. She grits her teeth and distracts herself with the soft brush of fur from his jacket against her temple, because throwing an elbow into a giant pilgrim's masked face at this exact moment would be disastrous. The pound of Trooper boots on stone is magnified by the acoustics of the crossroad, but it's not loud enough to drown out the tense muttering of the crowd as it jostles and pushes to stay clear of the white armor, the threatening blaster rifles. Behind Cassian, Jyn sees a huddle of Humans jabbing each other with elbows and scowling out at the cleared space in the street, watching the patrol with barely concealed hostility. A heavy-set Britaro on Cassian's other side raises her blue hand to her jacket pocket and then clenches her fist and drops it again. The Lorrdian swings their incense-burner with sharp, jittery moves, a contrast to the smooth, controlled circles they had been making before. All around her is the sensation of restlessness, a boiling anger bubbling just under the surface. Jyn shivers and resists the urge to close her eyes and bury her face further into the soft fur at her cheek. She knows this kind of anger, understands it like her own heartbeat because it has lived in her belly and her skin for years now. She just hasn't felt it on such an external scale in a long, long time. Not since Saw and Onderon and the -

She cuts that thought off. Not a good time to think about it, not with Stormtroopers barely ten steps away.

“We have to hurry,” Cassian peers over her head and watches the Troopers pass with hooded eyes. “This whole town…” his eyes snap down to hers, and if he's surprised to find her practically snuggling his shoulder he gives no sign. Jyn grimaces and jerks her head slightly back in explanation, watches him glance up and register the swinging incense-burner, and then look back to her with a sympathetic wince. “It’s about to blow,” he says softly, and there’s something in the way he looks at her that makes the weight of strange eyes on her back lighten. Maybe it’s just that she has been watching his sweep pattern, noting the way he moves carefully through the edges of the crowds and in what shadows are available, and she’s comforted to know that at least her…warden? Traveling companion? Temporary business partner, yes, that will do, at least her _temporary business partner_ knows how to move unseen. He’s not stupid, either. Even when it’s obvious that some part of him wants to barrel across the street and rescue the rebel pilots trudging silently to their likely deaths, he stands still and quiet at her side, head bent. His jaw is clenched and his hands are in tight fists at his sides, but she knows that he won’t compromise their mission.

She understands this anger, too, the anger she sees just-barely leashed behind his eyes. She might not be a rebel anymore, but she knows what it’s like to feel helpless.

It occurs to her that the warmth in her right arm is from his body heat, and that by angling her body away from the Lorrdian she has somehow forced her way almost under his arm. His hand is not quite brushing her back, but possibly only because he's deliberately holding very still.

The crowd starts to move around them, the troopers turning a far corner and vanishing from sight. Jyn frowns and steps away from the curve of his arm and the heat from his jacket; she can’t possibly get out of his reach in these teeming streets but she can put a little more room between them. She doesn’t think he’ll try something, not when he still needs her for Saw, not when he hasn’t made the slightest effort to take any advantage of her while they were trapped in close quarters on a U-Wing for days. But _if_ he tries something, maybe grabs his blaster back or, or…well, she’s just standing too close, that’s all.

Her sidestep moves her slightly into the passing foot traffic, but not nearly enough to justify the force with which the Aqualish slams into her shoulder. It almost knocks Jyn off her feet, sending her staggering back towards Cassian with a crash. The anger still burning in her belly flares higher, spreading up her spine and into her shoulders, tense and furious and desperate to lash out. Jyn catches her balance and twists back to find her assailant, that son of a bantha’s shitstains, and finds both an Aqualish and a Human with hideous burn scars staring back at her. “Hey, you just watch yourself,” the Human snarls, obviously as ready for a good fight as Jyn’s pounding blood.

She can see it as clear as a map hanging in the air, the path she will take – _one step forward and left fist swings with the momentum, knuckles collide with the bobbing adam’s apple on the Human’s throat, twist on her right heel and follow the momentum around to bring her elbow into the bulbous eyes of the Aqualish, two steps and she’s ducking because surely one of them will swing back even as they gasp, three steps and a follow-through with her right fist, uppercut to the Human’s weak chin and then_ –

“No, no, sorry,” an iron band is suddenly tight around her waist, and Jyn nearly throws her elbow back into the weight at her side, catches herself at the last moment as she recognizes who has grabbed her. “Tourist,” Cassian smiles over her head, his left arm now looped around her and dragging her back against his body, his right arm stretched out in an awkward, passive gesture to the bastards who started this fight. “We don’t want any trouble, sorry.”

Jyn tenses to wrench herself out of his grip. His weight against her shoulder is slowing her down, his grip around her waist limiting her ability to react (what if the ugly shutta pulled a blade on him, or the Aqualish inflated those pouches and spat poison in his pretty brown eyes, huh? He’d surely wish he had an agile ally at hand to save his backside _then,_ wouldn’t he?). But before she can twist herself free, Cassian's arm adjusts to a better grip on her upper body as if he’s felt her tiny movements and knows exactly what she is about to do. His fist curls into her thin jacket against her ribs, knuckles digging into the flesh just beneath her breast, and he angles his leg behind hers in a way that forces her to shuffle her feet or risk stumbling over it. The move puts her off balance, leaning harder against his side than she wants to be and unable to launch forward. Jyn stops thinking about punching the strangers and starts thinking about punching the spy, ignoring the small voice in the back of her head that almost admires how quickly and cleverly he outmaneuvered her.

“No trouble,” Cassian says again over her head to the huffing Aqualish and his melted asshole of a friend, his free arm still outstretched between them. “Sorry.”

The Aqualish gives a grumble that Jyn can’t quite catch, then tugs on the Human’s shoulder until they both turn to swagger off into the crowd. She doesn’t bother to watch them go, her attention caught by the flash of Cassian’s right wrist. He has pulled off his thick gloves for some reason (a fact she should have noticed already when he first dug his fingers into her ribcage), and his jacket sleeve has pulled back as he stretched out his arm, revealing a few fingers’ breadth of skin. It’s not his skin that’s caught her eye, though, nor the light callouses on his palms where a sniper rifle might sit, and it’s definitely not the long, slender shape of his fingers (she’s not even looking at them, why would she look at them?).

She thinks at first they are scars – odd, patchy grey scrapes dragged at random intervals up his wrist and disappearing into his sleeve. Something clawed him there? No, the marks are too strangely shaped, not straight lines but broken curves and fractured twists, and they aren’t really raised like scar tissue tends to be. Paint? A strange tattoo of some kind?

Cassian drops his arm so fast that it startles her, turning to look up at his face in surprise. His jaw is set grimly, the apologetic tourist replaced with the impassive spy as he stares down at her.

It takes her a moment to realize that he’s still holding her tight against his side. He seems to recognize it at the same moment, abruptly dropping his arm away and turning on his heel. “Come on,” he says over his shoulder. “We have to move.”

She has to stretch her legs to catch back up to him before he’s lost in the crowds, though she’s mildly relieved that once she’s back at his side he doesn’t make any attempt to dislodge her again. The sheer press of sentient beings in the narrow streets force them close immediately. Jyn tenses in case he turns and shoves her back, but she sees no sign that he even notices.

Until, that is, she glances down and sees his right hand curled into a fist again, held close to his thigh as he sidles and slips his way through the edges of the crowd. This time, there is no sign of Stormtroopers – it must be _her_ causing this reaction in him. Jyn briefly considers feeling guilty for it, then shakes that notion away. She’s not thrilled about being tied to him, either.

Even if he isn’t a half-bad partner to have in hostile urban terrain.

Her ribs ache in the place where his hand had clutched her jacket, high on her ribs under her breast. Strange, she hadn't thought he was pressing that tight into her skin; of course, she'd been distracted at the time. She wonders if she has a bruise there now, and then scoffs. What would it matter, anyway?


	4. again and again

Cassian feels it go wrong about ten seconds before the world explodes. The crowd around him thins a little too abruptly to be a natural ebb of traffic, all the colorful robes and disparate civilian styles partially receding like waves at a beach and highlighting the white Imperial shells left behind. The sounds of vendors shouting and pedestrians chattering simultaneously cuts off in multiple places, as if at least half the people in the marketplace have gone silent as one. Cassian frowns and sweeps the street around them, trying to find the source of unease that’s growing in his gut. They are close to a large Imperial checkpoint, more Stormtroopers and Imperial officers standing in small clusters here than anywhere else he’s seen in the city so far. Perhaps that’s the trouble, he’s merely picking up on the locals’ caution as he walks closer to the checkpoint. Perhaps he is only being paranoid.

Jyn’s shoulder tenses against his side.

Or perhaps not.

Something, instinct or perhaps experience, drags his attention up to the balconies that overhang the far side of the main street – just in time to see a cloaked figure launching something small, dark, and cylindrical into the air. The cylinder tumbles into the street and rolls under the front of an Imperial tank in a small cloud of red dust, and Cassian has just enough time to think _it won’t be enough_ and _mierda_

BOOM!

The ground shudders under his feet, and bits of flaming shrapnel streak past his face. The crowd scatters, screaming, Imperials shout, alarms blare from the checkpoint, civilians (not civilians) throw back their cloaks to reveal heavily-modded black market rifles, Stormtroopers raise their powerful military-grade blasters in response, and within moments the air is full of shrieking red bolts and the street is full of corpses.

Cassian bolts into the nearest cover, a narrow alley already packed with terrified civilians and bits of smoldering debris. His blaster is in his hands before he’s fully conscious of having drawn it, and the rough wall digs into his shoulder blades even through the thick padding of his jacket. Across from him, Jyn Erso crouches in a pose that mirrors his own – he even recognizes his blaster in her raised hands, her face is grim but her grip on the blaster hilt is practiced, professional.

She catches him looking, and her eyes flash with something like rage even as her mouth twists into a humorless smirk. “Looks like we found Saw’s rebels,” she calls across the gap between them. Cassian nods, and wonders if she recognizes any of the rebels out there in the chaos, or just the tactics they are using to generate it.

More figures on the balconies overhead, heavy blaster fire raining down on the Imperials scrambling through the streets and pouring out of the checkpoint’s main building. A decent strategy, although the high shooters are hampered by their comrades on the ground level, who keep running out to engage at close range with the ‘troopers. The checkpoint itself is a good kill box, a lot of relatively open space for the Partisans to surround their enemies and fire inward…except the very nature of Jedha’s layout means there are a hundred sidestreets and tiny alleys like the one Cassian and Jyn crouch in. There’s no way the Partisans can hope to keep their enemy contained in this space, and no way for them to coordinate a retreat when the fight turns in favor of the Empire’s bigger guns and incoming reinforcements. They’ll have to flee as individuals through the rat maze of Jedha’s streets, making it harder to trap several at once but almost inevitable that at least one of them will get caught and brought in alive. Cassian risks a quick lean to the side, checking down the main thoroughfare for the –

Jyn darts out into the blaster fire.

Cassian sees her go a moment too late – he lunges but his fingertips only barely scrape at her shoulder before she’s gone and he is left like a fool with his arm outstretched and his side exposed to enemy fire. A blaster bolt whistles past his strangely numb wrist and he slams his back into the wall again, startled and furious and surprisingly disappointed, glaring at her figure running through the chaos. What was he thinking? Of course she ran for it, of course she –

Through the smoke of the battle, he watches her drop to her knees – struck? No, reaching for something, for the –

For the child, the small, screaming child of maybe six or seven who is standing in petrified terror in the middle of this hellish insanity.

Cassian’s stomach twists so hard that he clamps his teeth together and sucks in a lungful of death-tinged air to stop the bile from surging up.

Jyn picks up the child and bolts for the nearest side street, her arms wrapped tight around the little figure’s back and her head low over the lopsided knit cap that the little one wears. An adult nearby rushes at Jyn - the parent judging by the outstretched arms and panicked expression - and Jyn shoves the little one across without hesitation. The parent whirls with their child in their arms, and both are lost to sight in the haze immediately.

A high-pitched whine from his nightmares joins the cacophony, cannons priming to fire. Cassian only barely catches himself before he launches out into the fray because _the tanks are about to fire_ and Jyn is still standing in the side street, watching the parent escape with their child. He surges to his feet and bellows over the rising whine of death locking on a target, no no _no_ he can’t let it happen not like this again not a shot in the streets fired by white armor into the back of someone he –

 _“Get out of there!”_ He raises his blaster and aims for the Trooper perched in the firing station on the tank, but too slow, he’s too slow, and Jyn startles and spins to look at him just as the tank fires up into the balconies.

The building collapses in a spectacular cascade of fire and falling bodies, Cassian’s shot flashes through the Trooper’s helmet like instant karmic retribution but more tanks are already roaring up from the main street, more speeders, more armored boots, the tide is moments away from turning and they cannot be here when the Imperials lock down the area.

Jyn is still up, running back across the street and ducking low behind the now-incapacitated tank. She slides to her knees and presses herself into the metal as much as she can, her hair falling into her eyes and her hands tight around his blaster again.

His heart pounds in his chest, his collar feels oddly tight around his throat, his mouth is dry, in his memory a child of six or seven screams for his parents while tanks fire into an open marketplace (it wasn’t like this, it wasn’t insurgents and grenades it was protestors and rocks, not like this firefight at all and yet - )

A squad of Stormtroopers thunder past her, mere hand-spans away from where she leans against the treads. Cassian flinches but they don’t see her, their attention still up on the overhead bridges where cloaked figures are scrambling to escape the last few crumbling balconies. A lone Partisan skims along a bridge to the north of the troopers, and Cassian sees another black cylinder in the gloved hand, recognizes the angle of the drawn-back arm, calculates trajectories and possible targets and in half of a heart-stopping instant he _knows_ where the grenade will land.

Jyn's face is turned south towards the troopers so she doesn’t see it, but Cassian does. A Partisan, one of the people he is trying to reach, one of the people he must somehow impress or befriend or at least bargain with to get what he needs for the Alliance; he is a Partisan, he is one of Saw’s Partisans – and he is about to kill Jyn Erso.

If Cassian fires, he will likely fail this mission. If he doesn’t, Jyn will die.

(Through the haze he catches a glimpse of a patch of dirt on her shoulder, a patch that even from this distance looks like the remnants of grimy tears pressed against the cloth.)

The Partisan rears back, the grenade in his hand already flashing, primed and ready to explode on impact.

Cassian fires.

The Partisan drops like a stone into a handful of his comrades. The grenade explodes, sending bodies flying out towards the Troopers.

Jyn turns and looks at Cassian.

His heart is still pounding, his right arm feels curiously numb, and his throat is tight, too tight. But Jyn looks at him, alive and breathing and startled because she knows what he’s done, knows what he’s just risked, and (despite the totally inappropriate setting for it) something inside him abruptly unclenches. He nods to her, hopes the relief in his gut doesn’t show on his face, and throws himself from his cover and out into the street before the Stormtroopers can recover from the concussive shock.

He’s not even surprised when Jyn bolts forward at the exact same time and pulls even with his shoulder within a few steps.

He _is_ surprised when she reaches out and grabs the collar of his jacket, throwing herself to the ground and dragging him with her. For a moment he is weightless and disoriented, tumbling down, then he feels the rush of rapidly expanding hot air against his back a moment before he hits the dirt. The impact knocks the oxygen from his lungs, so it takes a moment for him to register the roar of another grenade going off nearly at their heels, or to feel the tiny shards of burning metal peppering his legs from the speeder it took out.

A moment more to comprehend that the soft weight across his torso is Jyn’s body, the almost painful pressure against the left side of his neck is his collar digging into his throat where her grip has pulled his jacket and shirt askew, and the curling warmth on his collarbone is Jyn’s mouth, barely brushing against his newly-exposed skin as she pants.

Later, much later, he will find it strange how clearly he noticed every tiny brush of her lips against the hard line of his collarbone, more real to him than the stones jammed into his back or the adrenaline and terror thrumming in his blood. Later, he will wonder why it felt like being branded, why the memory of that brief touch hummed like a live wire under his shirt for so long after they had already scrambled back to their feet and pelted down the street again.

But right now, Cassian has no time to think about the crackle of strange energy that burns through him where she touched his skin, no time to think about the Partisans he has just killed or the ones he must somehow find. So he does the only thing he can do; he shoves himself back to his feet, hauls her up with him, and _runs._

* * *

Things happen very fast after the checkpoint assault, fast and terrible and overwhelming. Jyn is a survivor, though, so she does the only thing she can – she shuts down the parts of her mind that can’t cope with the insanity, shuts out the things she cannot begin to absorb, and clings only to what she must to continue.

This means that when she thinks of it later, the events of the next twelve hours seem to happen in a series of frozen tableaux, brief moments where she stands at crossroad after crossroad, careening down a path that snaps wildly back and forth across alien territory.

The beggar king reappears in spectacular fashion; his shaggy guard points a cannon at Kay (Jyn could stay hunkered behind the meager cover she’s found and holds her tongue, she doesn’t want trouble with locals and she doesn’t know or trust this Imperial-built murder machine) but as the cannon barrel swings at the droid, she bolts out into the open and stands between them, hands outstretched to stop the execution.

A Tognath Partisan puts a rifle to Cassian Andor’s head (she could stay silent, let them pull the trigger in vengeance for the Partisans he killed and Jyn will be free of the Alliance and their politics) but she shouts them down, ties him to her and holds Saw’s approval hostage until the Partisans drop their aim and bring him along.

Saw smiles at her as if they are parent and child accidentally reunited after a terrible cataclysm, as if he loves her, as if he has missed her terribly (she could smile back, take his hand, pack her anger down or let it dissolve at last and be his honored and beloved child again, his best lieutenant, his Jyn, fierce and proud and loyal to her bones) but she steps back, jaw tight and arms crossed, holding her fury tight against her chest.

Papa says _my love for her has never faded_ (she could turn away, she could close her ears, she could stomp her boot on the fragile holodisk, she could turn away she could run she could _stop_ ) but she drops to her knees and lets the pain (the relief) sink it’s hooks into her scars and rip them open again.

Cassian grabs her arm and leans close to her ear, so close and yet he still must shout over the shattering of the world, the shattering of her heart _I know where your father is_ (she could jerk her arm free and leave him to Saw’s mercy, she could jerk her arm free and step back into Saw’s arms, she could jerk her arm free and strike him across the face, leave him behind as she runs and runs and runs) but she leans against his hand as he pulls her up and follows him through heaving stone and billowing fire. Dimly she registers the Guardians among the many figures dashing madly through the chaos, and has at least enough energy to be grateful they are not yet dead.

A lanky man in an Imperial flightsuit scrambles wildly to crawl into the U-Wing, his attention fixed more on the monstrous tsunami of earth and wreckage roaring overhead (she could use his stooped shoulder as a balance point, launch herself up and over him and into the thin relative safety of the ship, knocking him back into the dust beneath the wailing thrusters) but Jyn plows into his side and throws him up into the open hatch. The move slows her down, the ship rising fast as she tosses the Imperial’s bony backside over the edge. She tenses to leap up, ready to catch her arms on the rapidly rising deckplates, but Cassian winds both arms around her torso and all but drags her with him as he jumps. They land clumsily, his weight against her back and his clenched fist digging into her ribs, but he’s gone before she has fully registered any of it, running for the cockpit and shouting at Kay to _go! Go! Now!  
_

The ship screams through the air, Jyn leans against the viewscreen and watches the death throes of a planet clawing at her in animal despair, and the only thought she can remember later is _he didn't leave me._

She’s not certain who she means.

* * *

Cassian’s right arm is numb under his jacket, but then, so is the rest of him, so he hardly notices.

They killed a planet.

They killed a _planet._

They killed a planet and Jyn Erso stares at him with a fire in her eyes that burns through the numbness like a hot iron against ice. The Imperial pilot says _he told me I could make it right, if I was brave enough._

Cassian wonders how he is even meant to begin telling this story to Command. To anyone. Who would believe him? He barely believes it himself. And yet, he must try. He must write this report, send it to Command and make them understand what has happened. He must go where Command sends him, where the war sends him, and read the next chapter of the horror story he is trapped in.

Sweet Force, they killed a planet.

And they are going to do it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the chapter count is creeping up. It happens.
> 
> I made some minor adjustments to how things happened in Jedha: when Jyn threw Cassian to the ground to shield him from a grenade, she landed on his back and not his chest, and when they ran into the U-Wing after the Death Star fired, Jyn didn't have to throw Bodhi and so Cassian didn't have to drag _her_. Believe it or not, I changed these minor scenes for very specific reasons pertaining to the soulmarks, which will (hopefully) be made clear at the end. So don't @ me, I know what I did.


	5. these twists and turns of fate

“Do you have that message?” Cassian asks, because a hologram, a message, something physical that can be held and taken apart and analyzed down to the code, it might not be enough but it would be _something_. He has enough threads that he can weave together a reasonable approximation of what is happening out there, he’s done more with far less in his days of hunting through the Empire for anything of value, anything that could help them fight back. But this, this monstrosity, they won’t believe _reasonable_ , they won’t believe an _approximation_ – Cassian was _there_ when the Empire killed a world, and even he barely believes such a thing can exist. They need the holomessage, they need Galen Erso’s face and voice as he explains what he has unleashed on the galaxy. It will at least be something the Senators and the Councilors can watch, something they will acknowledge as evidence and not dismiss as just another story.

Jyn freezes, her empty hands clench. “It all happened so fast,” she whispers, the ghost of a daughter’s desperate tears and a planet’s dying convulsions in her eyes.

Cassian’s stomach drops. They have so little. Her word, his story, a few shell-shocked survivors.

It isn’t enough.

* * *

The pilot – Bodhi – rocks quietly in the corner of the U-Wing’s dimly lit bay, chewing on his lip, worrying at his filthy flight gloves. It would unnerve Jyn, except she’s seen worse cases of shell-shock. Battlefields, prisons, half-empty passenger holds after a desperate last-second hyperspace jump, tiny dark caves lit by a single flickering lamp –

She’s seen worse.

Granted, she’s never sat across from someone processing the destruction of their entire culture before, wiped out without even ruins to pick through after the Star Destroyers glide back into the void from which they came. She’s never seen one of Saw’s prisoners quite so…wrecked.

The man’s hands tremble as he tugs and tugs erratically at his flight gloves, one moment pulling the torn material like he means to tug them off, the next yanking them back down over his wrists. He doesn’t seem to know he’s doing it, and it’s no good for the already abused fabric (no good for his already abused mind). She’s tempted to ask the beggar king – the Guardian, the mystical there-are-no-more-Jedi monk, what was his name, _Chirrut_ – to talk to the poor pilot, but then, that’s hardly fair. It was Chirrut's world, too, and for longer, she supposes. Anyway, he seems to be deep into some kind of silent argument with the shaggy guard (once one of the most devoted Guardians of all, she’s been told, though she’s not sure how he made the transition from mystical warrior to ‘carries an actual tank cannon on his back’). Cassian and Kay are absorbed in their calculations in the cockpit, or at least pretending to be.

Bodhi warps the thumb of his right glove into a tight, painful looking twist with his left hand, and she’s not entirely sure his right thumb isn’t twisting along with the material.

Right.

Jyn gets up and strides to the empty seat next to Bodhi. She makes a point not to look at anyone except him, but she can feel the Guardians watching her back from their spot near the stern, and out of the corner of her eye she is almost sure she sees Cassian watching her advance in his direction warily.

Bodhi flinches when she sits down, of course, and Jyn frowns and forces her shoulders to drop, her fists to unclench. It's no good looking like she’s about to attack him, he’s jumpy as a gizka on a hot plate already. “Hey,” she says in as calm and gentle a tone as she can manage (he flinches again, clearly her Nice Person Voice needs work), “you’ll damage them even more. Here.”

She reaches out and holds her hands in front of him, waiting. She wants to just grab his wrists and yank the gloves off, toss them in his lap and then march back to her spot by the viewscreen. She’s still refusing to look, but she can feel the attention of everyone in this damn tiny ship focused on her. But while Jyn’s no nurse or soul-soother or special priest, she knows better than to grab at someone who has just been through one or more of the many hells. She can’t fix his problems, but she can at least have the courtesy not to make it worse.

Bodhi watches her for a long, nervous moment ( _You're Galen’s daughter, he said I could get right by myself, it’s too late, it’s too late_ ), and then he carefully sets his shaking palms against hers. It’s a light touch; more than anything it makes her think of small, shivering birds ready to take startled flight at any moment. She tries to be gentle as she grabs the fabric of his gloves and pulls them both off with swift, sure movements. ( _It’s_ not _too late_ , she thinks at him fiercely, but she doesn’t say it out loud again. Doesn’t want to throw her anger in his face when he’s dealing with enough.)

Bodhi gasps, and Jyn jerks back, still clutching the gloves, startled. Did she hurt him? Maybe he had a cut on his hands she hadn’t noticed, or –

She sees it a moment later, as Bodhi raises his right hand up before his face and stares at it. There are words written on the back of his hand, neat black print curving from thumb to pinkie. Or at least, they clearly were neat at some point. Now they are distorted, like someone has thrown acid over the ink and caused it to partially dissolve in messy streaks. The letters seem to be melting down his skin, or bleeding. Jyn can just barely make them out – _hey, keep it down over there, flyboy!_ – before Bodhi clamps his other hand over the disturbed letters and rubs it frantically. She can already see the skin redden under the assault, bruises and small cuts on his fingers tugging and splitting as he scrapes at his skin.

“Hey!” This time Jyn does grab his wrists, pulling his hands apart roughly. “Hey, stop it, stop, it’s okay. Stop! Bodhi!”

He struggles, but the movements are wild, not pulling away from her but simply flailing blindly. She can hold him easily, but she’s not sure what else to do except keep him from smacking his limbs or maybe his head against the hard bulkhead behind him. “It’s – they’re broke – something broken – the letters are all - I can’t – why – I don’t _know_ I didn’t _lie_ I– “

“Be still, Bodhi Rook,” Chirrut is suddenly kneeling on the grate before Bodhi, his staff propped against the bulkhead behind him, his hands resting on his knees. He is relaxed, like he’s about to settle into deep meditation or perhaps a nap, and he does not reach out to help Jyn corral Bodhi’s frantic movements. “Breathe in,” he inhales, long and slow, “and out,” exhale, and Jyn finds herself counting mentally, _two, three, four, five_. “In,” _two, three, four, five_ , “and out,” _two three, four, five._

Bodhi’s breath shudders and jerks, but he is caught in Chirrut’s rhythm too, and after a long moment and several breaths, his wrists relax enough in Jyn’s hands to risk letting go. She does, slowly, and keeps her hands on her lap and ready to reach back.

“It’s broken,” Bodhi says, a small sob rolling his words. “My soulmark. It’s, it’s broken.”

“Soulmarks are never broken,” Chirrut replies serenely. He lifts his chin slightly, and even in the poor light Jyn can see the double-mark on his throat, _may you walk in the Force_ , or at least that’s what he claimed it said. The red letters are barely legible in this light, but the identical black ones are as clear as a cloudless night. For the second time, Jyn finds herself wondering at the dual mark, why his words seem to have printed across his skin in two different colors and intensities in a way she’s never even heard of before. “They can change, adapt, and even leave us,” Chirrut makes an abortive gesture with one hand that Jyn can’t quite read, a short and sharp motion at odds with his relaxed demeanor, “but they do not _break_.”

“You have,” Bodhi says, his eyes still wide and not-quite-focused, but staring at Chirrut all the same. “A mark? You have - that’s a, on your neck, that’s a soulmark, right?”

“Every Guardian acolyte is trained to say this phrase to each other when they first meet,” Chirrut repeats, dipping his head slightly. It’s not a refusal, but it’s not, Jyn notes sardonically, an affirmation either.

“So he’s, um, he’s got the same?” Bodhi nods across the U-Wing to where the great bulk of the gunman rests with his boots propped up on a crate and his cannon settled on the bench beside his thigh. Jyn takes care to look only from the corner of her eye, refusing to turn her head and stare point-blank at the scowling, heavily-armed man. She doesn’t know him, but if someone were to ask so directly about _her_ soulmark…

The big man – Baze, Baze, his name is Baze Malbus, which sounds vaguely familiar but she can’t quite place it, a merc probably, or someone on the hit circuit – glowers across the cargo hold at them. Jyn holds still and keeps her face turned away (her gloved hand near her blaster), but Bodhi’s eyes are glassy and still a little unfocused, so he doesn’t seem to notice the hostile reaction.

The silence is tense, charged, and Jyn’s hand twitches for her blaster though she keeps it pressed to her thigh. And then Chirrut cocks his head to the side and says with a strange little twist to his mouth, “Well?”

Baze’s eyes narrow. “No.”

“No?” Bodhi blinks, and then blinks again, his face shifting to embarrassed horror. “Oh. Oh! You’re not - sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t - I thought – you seemed like – but I’m sorry I guess my head is still – I’m still – in my head – “ His babbling turns from nervous to terrified again, hands beginning to shake and eyes blanking as he slips back into whatever dark place he’s been trying to escape.

Jyn grabs his arms again, although he hasn’t yet started flapping them. Behind her, she thinks she hears boots scraping the decking, someone standing up and stepping towards her, but her attention is caught by the way Bodhi’s thin wrists shake in her grip.

Chirrut clears his throat softly.

Baze rolls his eyes. “I am marked,” he grunts, as if this explains…anything.

“Oh,” Bodhi says again, and for a moment his blind panic is replaced with a more normal confusion.

Chirrut doesn’t move or make a sound, but somehow his stillness seems to be saying something anyway. Jyn squints at him, feeling like she’s listening to a conversation in a language she doesn’t speak.

Baze sighs. Stiffly he settles his boots back on the deck and leans forward, tugging at his chestplate. He’s close enough that when he dips his head, pulls his long dark hair aside, and unsnaps the collar-latches on the chestplate, Jyn can see the back of his exposed neck relatively clearly.

Thick red marks are painted across the nape of his neck, letters written in a flowing hand entirely unlike the neat printed words on Chirrut’s throat. The letters are still recognizable as Jedhan script, however, and before Jyn can ask (she is _not_ going to ask), Bodhi reads them out loud. “ _I prefer to dance_.” He frowns. “Um. Okay?”

Baze sighs again, resettles his armor, and goes back to examining his repeater cannon’s belt feeder like this has definitely settled matters. Bodhi now looks so confused that he’s forgotten to panic.

Jyn eyes Chirrut. “I thought every Guardian was supposed to greet people with ‘may you walk in the Force.’”

“It discourages preferences,” Chirrut agrees genially, smiling serenely. Baze snorts. Despite herself, Jyn feels a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“So…you are, uh, you are bonded?” Bodhi asks slowly, though Jyn’s not sure how much of his careful tone is due to the social stigma of asking about soulmarks and how much is simply the pilot feeling his way back from whatever terrified darkness had gripped him earlier.

“We are all bound through the living Force,” Chirrut stretches his fingers out before him, then drops them back to his knees. “But yes, in this specific case, Baze is my soulmate.”

“Your marks look so different, though,” Bodhi’s hands are limp in Jyn’s grip, so she gently lets go again and settles back against the bulkhead. “Yours are, are mirrored or something?”

Chirrut hesitates, although it’s such a brief moment that Jyn thinks she’s imagining it. “So it is.”

Across the hold, Baze’s hands still on his cannon, and then resume again.

“But mine is,” Bodhi stares at his hands. “It’s – it’s _broken._ It didn’t look like that before, before that thing in, in the…” He raises his head, his hair falling in scraggly strands across his cheeks and eyes. Jyn suppresses the strangest urge to reach up and push them out of his face. His voice cracks as he stares blankly at Chirrut like he is desperate for an answer, any answer, but certain he will not find one. “What if that – what does that _mean?_ ”

“Nothing,” Jyn says firmly, before Chirrut or anyone else can answer. She feels a surge of fire burn through her blood, a sort of directionless anger that she can’t quite place. Anger at Saw, perhaps, for turning down so dark a path as Bodhi’s condition suggests. Anger at the Empire for twisting her commander so brutally (her father, though she won’t use that label for him, not sure she can use it for anyone even as _my love for her has never faded_ echoes in her heart). Anger at Galen Erso for speaking of _his_ home, _his_ family, as if he alone had lost everything. Anger at the Alliance for not being enough to really challenge the Empire. Anger at…

She didn’t know, and the rage boiling in her heart is too loud, it drowns out her hard-earned reserve and spills from her lips before she can think better of it. “It doesn’t mean anything at all. Soulmarks are just words, and words change all the time.” And then, to her distant horror, she hears herself add, “Mine did.”

Bodhi is staring at her now, Baze watching from the corner of his eye as his hands move surely over the body of the cannon. Chirrut tilts his head, the slightest movement, and behind her –

Behind her, she hears something clatter, a tiny sound cut off abruptly, someone dropping and then catching something immediately.

She doesn’t turn around to look. She can’t, the horror of what she has confessed splashing through her body like ice water to dowse the fires of rage.

“Your…your mark changed?” Bodhi asks, and it is only the tremor in his voice that stops Jyn from storming away from him to huddle in the far corner of the U-Wing. In his lap, his hands still shake, the thumb of his left hand rubbing restlessly against the bleeding letters on his right.

She’s not responsible for Saw’s choices, but…

Jyn closes her eyes, shrugs her shoulders as casually as she can. “Yeah. It changed. It changed when I was a child, after I lost – “ She swallows, her throat too tight to finish the sentence. The silence settles in the U-Wing too heavily, though, a vacuum pulling the words out of her, however reluctantly she gives them. “It’s pretty ugly.” She says at last. “Can barely read it anymore.”

Bodhi’s left thumb stills on the back of his right hand. For a moment he seems to be pressing down, digging his thumbnail into the skin, the tip of his thumb turning white and the letters warping under the pressure – but then he pulls his hands apart and sets them on his knees, in a position not unlike Chirrut’s.

“I’m, I’m sorry,” he says again, softly, though this one feels directed at her, not to his panic in general.

Jyn shrugs, clumsily pats his elbow, and only then allows herself to stride across the U-Wing and settle on Baze’s far side, leaning against the viewport and staring at the streaks of blue and white flowing around the ship. Baze catches her eye for a brief moment, and Jyn cringes internally. But all the big man does is flick a bushy eyebrow at her, a silent sort of grumpy solidarity that they have both been conned into exposing their private business. He turns back to his cannon before she can respond, and Jyn feels herself relax marginally. She told someone. This is the first time she’s told anyone (Saw knew, he’d seen, but she never _told_ him), and…and it’s fine, she tells herself fiercely. She told someone, and the galaxy didn’t immediately crash to a halt. They didn’t all turn and stare at her with horror or disgust. Her soulmark has grown into a hideous mash of thorns but she’s still here. Still fighting. Still alive.

Chirrut and Bodhi are talking again across the U-Wing, but their voices are low enough that Jyn can tune out the words without much effort. Baze’s tiny wrench scrapes steadily against the metal of his cannon. In the cockpit, she can see K2SO sitting still as any statue, possibly in low-power mode or recharging. Next to him, Cassian sits with his hands resting against the console, not running through endless screens or messing with some small electronic component the way he did during the down times between Yavin and Jedha. In fact, he seems almost as still as Kay, although on him it’s an unnatural look, stiff and worrisome. Jyn feels her back tense up, her fists clench, her chest tighten in anticipation of – of – _something_.

She’s debating calling out to him when she sees him slowly rotating his right arm, pause, then roll it back the other way, a strange and rhythmic movement that he doesn’t even seem to notice he’s making. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s actually rubbing his right wrist slowly against the edge of the console, as if he’s scratching at an itch under his sleeve. Abruptly, she recalls the marks she saw on his wrist in Jedha, thick and grey and unreadable. She had thought perhaps they were scars, but perhaps they were soulmarks. It seems statistically unlikely to have so many soulmarked people in one small ship - the marks aren't _rare_ but they aren't that normal either. But then, nothing about this day has been statistically likely, has it? Nothing about the last several months - really, her entire life - has been normal. Why should this be any different? So the spy is soulmarked too. She thinks _good for him_ for a bitter moment, then catches herself. Being soulmarked hasn't exactly been a great source of comfort or happiness in her life, has it? Not fair to assume it is for him. Especially considering how those marks had looked, pale and scar-like on his skin.

An inexplicable urge to reach out and touch him pulls at her suddenly, a desire to run her fingers over those marks and see if they really are raised like scars or soft as any unblemished skin. And worse, worse than _that_ madness, she feels an urge to slip her fingertips under her thick wool socks and trace the thorny letters on her shin. It’s been a long time since she’s allowed herself to touch them and she can’t… _shavit,_ she can’t remember what they feel like any more. When was the last time she touched her mark? Even in the sonic, she makes a point of not looking, not letting her unmarked leg brush against her marked one, and its been ages since she’s been in a water shower, which would require at least some contact to dry herself off.

She wonders who his soulmate could possibly be. Has he ever met them? Maybe he’s lost them, that might explain his relentless drive to keep fighting even in the face of the Empire’s vast indifference. That might explain the intensity in his eyes when he leaned over and told her that rebellions were built on hope.

It hardly matters, though, does it? When this is over, assuming she survives it, he will walk away from her back to whatever life a rebel spy leads, back to his soulmate or his rebel principles or whatever it is that keeps him moving. He will walk away from her forever and she will…

She will…

Jyn’s long given up on her own soulmate. Whoever they are, they are living their own life and she certainly has no place in it. She decides that Cassian’s mate, his mark, is not her business either. Nor is _her_ mark any of his business, for that matter. Not that he asked about it. Not that he probably _would_ ask about it, now that he knows. Now that she's told him.

She settles firmly into her seat and looks out the viewport, watching the stars streak by. He won’t ask. She’s not wasting any more time thinking about it.

(But if he did - )

* * *

About an hour before they drop out of hyperspace at Eadu, Cassian locks himself in the tiny fresher in the back of the U-Wing and pulls up his sleeve. His arm feels curiously numb for some reason, has been feeling numb for hours, maybe days. He has been purposefully ignoring it, but now that he’s thinking about it he can’t remember when that sensation started. His entire forearm responds to pressure and touch but in a muffled, distant way. It's like he’s been pressing his arm against ice and all his nerves have shut down in protest.

The grey letters are fragmented so badly that they look more like a skin disease than a mystical blessing. It takes a long moment for Cassian to remember that they used to be blue. Dark blue, strong and flowing like deep water under the ice.

He wonders for a moment what Jyn’s mark looks like. _It changed_ , she says in that odd soft voice he hasn’t heard her use before, _it changed when I was a child, when I lost –_

A part of him wants to know what she lost, even as the rest of him knows with sinking finality that it’s not a question he has any right to ask. Her father? Her mother? Saw Gerrera? Her innocence, her sense of safety, her belief that when bad things happened the adults would always show up and fix things, if only she were a good child, if only she did what was _right_ …

The ‘fresher lights flicker, cheap bulbs dying out and in need of a change. The U-Wing rocks slightly in hyperspace turbulence, and the space is so tiny that the small motion makes his shoulders press against the bulkhead on either side as he sways with it. He stares at his marked arm and wonders idly if his soulmate’s mark has broken up as badly as this. It’s the first time he’s thought about them at all in five…no, six years. It’s the first time he’s thought about the soulmark at all, outside of whether or not he needed to hide it for a mission.

And he’s not thinking about it now. _Tell me a story_ \- hells. What story could he possibly tell a soulmate if they asked? So much of his life is classified, with lives hanging in the balance of his silence. And the parts that aren’t off limits, well, they aren’t exactly storybook material, are they? Would he tell them about the time he killed his first sentient being? His tenth? How about the time he was nearly captured, hunkering in a dark closet holding his lullaby pill so close to his mouth he could smell the death in it? The time he freed an Imperial security droid and the first thing he asked the droid to do was break someone’s skull? The time he shot an ally in the back to keep him out of Stormtrooper hands? _And so – the boy became a sniper and the sniper became a spy and the spy became a man who leaves people behind to save himself._

He closes his eyes and shoves his sleeve back down over his cold arm. The marks are irrelevant. He doesn’t have a soulmate.

He can’t.

* * *

“I’m just going to scout,” Cassian says on Eadu. “Stay here.”

Jyn stands in the open hatch and watches the rain pound against the jagged rocks. There is a spare set of field gear secured to the bulkhead just behind the cockpit; a jacket, poncho, cap and eye protection, snap-on cleats for rough terrain and a water-proof ammunition belt. Jyn’s hands itch at her sides, wanting to grab the gear and slip out into the night. She grips them into fists and studies the paths in the shadows before her. Cassian said stay. Her heart screams at her to go. Something had been strange in the way he said it, but he hadn’t been wrong about their odds against a fully manned Imperial facility. A short scout with only two people, one of whom knew the area, was a reasonable approach to infiltration.

Stay, or go? Trust, or don’t?

“The Force moves darkly near a creature that’s about to kill,” murmurs Chirrut, his hands tight on his staff, the ship lights throwing his shadowed soulmark into curious relief against his throat.

“His weapon was in the sniper configuration,” notes Kay from the cockpit, looking like a dark cutout against the flashing storm through the viewscreen behind him.

( _My father made a choice! He sacrificed himself for the Rebellion. You don’t believe me?)_

_(I’m not the one you’ve got to convince.)_

The freezing rain drenches her the moment she steps out of the hatch, and a strange sort of ache pulses against her ribs on the left side under her breast (under her heart). She makes a mental note to check for a bruise there later, pulls the poncho as tight around her neck as she can to keep out the wet, and heads for the research facility.


	6. unfinished stories

The rifle is in his hands and he knows this is not the right way.

It’s the way he was ordered, though, the way his superiors think it must happen. Cassian is a smart person, and he’s worked hard to be perceptive and come to quick, mostly-accurate conclusions. So when his gut tells him _no, not like this, it doesn’t have to be like this_ , a part of him is inclined to listen.

But then, he’s ignored that part of himself before, and been right to do so. Command knows more about the war than he does. The Analysis division has been processing more information than just what fragments Cassian has managed to drag back to the base. If they say _Galen Erso has to die_ _for the rebellion to survive_ , then who the hells is Cassian Andor to say it isn’t so?

Cassian stretches out on the bitter cold rocks of Eadu, the black stone stabbing into his front like small blunt knives, the rain stabbing into his back like frozen needles, the rifle heavy and cold in his bare hands.

In the green-tinted world of his scope, Galen Erso stares down a man in a flowing white Imperial uniform. The scientist’s face is worn, his shoulders stooped, his soaked hair stringy and thin against his scalp. But his eyes…

There’s a defiance in Galen Erso's dark eyes, tinged green from the scope and sunken deep into an exhausted face. There is a carefully contained rage burning just behind the terror and the submission. There is, Cassian thinks, a rebellious kind of hope.

The rifle is heavy in his hands. Dimly, he’s aware of the icy rain soaking in through his jacket cuffs, drops of bitter cold slipping around the grey marks on his forearm. It’s soaking through his collar too, a single cold drop trickling down his neck to pool at his collarbone.

He doesn’t move. He has endured worse cold before.

Galen Erso raises his head, his eyes still intent on the white-cloaked Imperial, his hand outstretched between the Deathtroopers and the other scientists huddled behind him.

_Galen Erso is vital to the Empire’s weapon program. You find him, you kill him. Then and there._

It’s the easier way, Cassian knows this. The quicker way, the safer way. The way he’s been ordered.

( _It isn’t too late_ , she tells the shaking pilot, her face pale and dirt-smeared from their mad dash to safety, but her jaw set, her eyes fierce. Defiant. _It isn’t too late_.)

The rifle is heavy in his cold, cold hands, and this cannot be the only way.

Can it?

In his head he writes the story – and so, the rebel shot the father and ran back to his ship. He was halfway there before the daughter caught up and shot him in the back.

And so – the rebel spy shot the Imperial scientist and fled into the freezing dark rain. He lasted a day, perhaps two, until the daughter caught up and threw him off the jagged cliffs.

And so – the spy shot the scientist and sat quietly, waiting for the daughter to tear him to pieces as she grieved.

And so – the man shot the father and the Alliance lost an experienced spy, and a high-value defector, _and_ a soldier who could have been an ally, could have been an asset, could have been a friend if only -

And so - the man put down his rifle and -

And –

And?

* * *

Jyn knows as soon as she sees his haggard face; the Empire has destroyed her father.

But it’s the Alliance that kills him, in the end.

 _I have so much to tell you_ , Papa gasps, but he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he never tells her anything, he just closes his eyes and leaves her behind one last time.

Eadu dissolves into a mess of black rain and white fire, a hard grip around her waist, bony ribs against her shoulder, the thunder of bombs all around her barely audible over the roar of her blood in her ears and _Jyn, Stardust, it must be destroyed_.

The world strobes in flashes of painful bright light and terrible stormy darkness, there are X-Wings and surface cannons and the groan of mountains ripping apart under the assault, and then there is a ramp, pale light, Chirrut and Baze sitting next to her and Bodhi somewhere in the cockpit with Kay and –

And Cassian.

Cassian, breaking down a sniper rifle as calmly as if he’s just been for a pleasant walk. Cassian, pulling off his sodden gloves and jacket and running a hand through his hair, brisk and measured and probably already thinking about tomorrow, the next day, the next move in a war that _never ends_. Cassian, who told her to stay while he ‘scouted’ but who really left her behind so he could murder the man she never really got to meet.

Cassian, who nodded when she said trust goes both ways, who didn’t take her blaster back, who walked side by side with her through Jedha, who understood the value of information, who had to have known what Galen Erso could bring to the Alliance –

Who told her to stay behind while he snapped a scope on his rifle.

The pounding of rain and the whine of an engine in atmosphere vanish abruptly. The ship jolts, stabilizes, and then out the viewscreen she sees blue streaks as the stars expand and warp around them.

“You lied to me,” she says into the quiet of hyperspace.

He doesn’t look at her, still methodically stripping away the bitter cold evidence of Eadu, and that alone tells her everything she needs to know.

Freezing cold water drips down her spine and pools in her boots; Galen Erso died in the rain, soaked to the skin and left to lie in a twisted puddle as she ran. There is a burning rage building in Jyn’s belly, stoked higher and higher with every breath she draws; Saw Gerrera died in the fires of Jedha, burnt to ash and scattered on howling winds as she ran from that, too. Around her neck, her mother’s crystal scrapes at her skin, sharp point pressing against the hollow of her throat. Vaguely, she can feel muddy earth sucking at her boots as thick green vines grab at her ankles as she runs from the sounds of blaster fire, from the strange shape of Mama plunging down into the grass and out of sight.

Cassian still won’t look at her, moving around the stolen shuttle, snapping gear into the safety webbing, prodding at panels and screens. His face is blank, impassive, his eyes far away. It freezes the ice in her spine, fuels the fire in her guts. How dare he? How _dare_ he pretend that none of this matters, that she’s just some silly girl throwing a tantrum while he’s some stoic rebel hero doing the necessary work?

“You lied about why we came here and you lied about why you went up there." She counts them off, his sins, stepping close and raising her voice, loading all the fire and ice in her body into her words.

She not sure what does it, the words or the tone or the fact that she’s now too close to ignore, but he whirls on her abruptly, his face grim but his distant eyes sharpening like knives. It gives her a vicious sense of satisfaction, to drag him back from wherever he was hiding in his head to this moment, this place, to _her._ He denies pulling the trigger, even seems to demand some sort of – of what? Approval? Gratitude? As if he wasn’t the one to call in the Alliance, as if he didn’t tell the X-Wings where to find Galen Erso. As if he didn’t tell Jyn to wait for him in the dark while he went to kill her father.

“I had orders,” he snaps, “orders that I disobeyed!”

The cold water freezes her skin even as the fire burns beneath it, and Jyn Erso, given puzzles by her parents and battle tactics by her commander and the endless challenge of survival by the universe at large – Jyn sees it. It’s brief and well-hidden, held close to his chest, but it’s there in the crack of his voice and the slight widening of his eyes when he says the words _orders_ and _disobeyed_. She sees it, his weakness, his quiet anger turned inward on himself, and the blood pounds in her ears again as she snarls, “Orders? When you know they’re wrong?”

He stills, some animal instinct sensing the cruelty of the blow even before she lands it, but it’s too late for her to stop; he lied to her and he left her and he killed the last of her parents. So even though Jyn’s chest aches and aches, she doesn’t bite back the words, lets them lash out of her mouth like a blow, like a blaster shot. “You might as well be a Stormtrooper.”

Cassian freezes, his face gone blank again but it’s no longer the distant mask of indifference, it’s something else, something she can’t name but suddenly can’t stand to look at anymore. She turns away – but she should have known better. Whatever else Cassian may be, he’s fast and he’s determined and he’s in her face before she can get more than a step away from him, and now his eyes are wild, now his teeth are bared, and he may not have been Saw Gerrera’s child but he finds her weakness all the same. “You’re not the only one who lost everything,” he hisses at her, and under his words she hears what he doesn’t say, _coward, selfish frightened child, always running, always angry at the people who left you even as you ran away and left them to their deaths._

She wants to grab his arm and twist it, wants to punch him, wants to tear and rip and cry, but doesn’t because he’s wrong he’s wrong he’s wrong but he’s also right and it _hurts._ Her chest aches, everything aches, something throbs painfully in her ribs under her left side (perhaps she took a bolt there, she hasn’t checked and she can’t). Her father is dead and this spy has nothing but contempt for her, nothing but the ice in his voice and the fire in his eyes. She swallows the fire and spits it back, both of them splintering under the assault until –

Until there is nothing left to say.

Her ribs are burning and her skin is frozen, and the words in her mouth are ash.

* * *

“There is increased message traffic between Council members,” Kay tells him as they step off the stolen Imperial shuttle and into the hangar of Yavin IV.

The humid heat is an uncomfortable sensation against Cassian’s skin, which has finally dried but still feels brittle and prickly with cold. He tugs his brown Alliance jacket over his shoulders, makes sure his rank badge is pinned straight against his pocket, and tries to ignore the sensation of clammy hands against the back of his neck. “Tell me you’re not slicing into Mothma’s personal messages again, Kay.”

“I am not reading the messages,” Kay replies stiffly, deeply offended. As if he has not done this exact thing a dozen times before. Cassian almost smiles at his friend’s tone, but the weight of the last few weeks pulls at his face still, and in the end he settles for merely being distantly amused. “I am only looking at the increase in message traffic on the classified server. I calculate at least an eighty-three percent chance that there will be a major Council meeting held within the day cycle.” He whirs slightly, a familiar soft sound deep in his chassis that means he is running a calculation twice to check for errors. “There is a seventy percent chance someone will invite you to that meeting within the hour.”

“More than seventy,” Cassian murmurs. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the rest of his…passengers? Contacts? Not crew. Assets, he supposes, or something like that. Although considering that Jyn Erso is more likely to snap his bones than help him in any way, the label of ‘asset’ sits a little sourly on his tongue.

“My calculations are based on historical data and current facts,” Kay’s voicebox alters to the specific tonal frequency he uses when someone has insulted his capacity for analysis. “What is yours based on?”

Cassian turns away from the disembarking Jedhans, away from the nervous shake of the pilot’s hands, away from the serene glide of the smaller monk offset by the impatient stride of the bigger one. Away from the tension in Jyn’s shoulders and the way her face turns to sweep the hangar, marking the sniper posts in the catwalks, the paths between the X-Wings, the multiple sliding doors; it’s the scan pattern practiced by a soldier in hostile territory, the careful assessment of a potential trap by someone who has been caught before. He does not have time to compare his own scan patterns to hers and note the many points of overlap. He does not have time to… he has things he should do. Things like…like register this stolen Imperial ship, which he can already see Alliance hangar techs swarming around, thumbing their tool kits, eyeing the engines and wing nacelles as they mentally contemplate where to search for hidden Imperial trackers or booby traps. Cassian can find the ship registry and present it to the hangar chief, and then maybe start figuring out what the hells he is going to tell Draven when he –

When he walks around the corner of the ship and crosses his arms, one thin eyebrow raised as he meets Cassian’s eye.

“He’s probably going to tell you about the Council meeting,” Kay says.

Cassian swallows back a sigh.

“I see Erso is still alive,” Draven says as Cassian approaches. Cassian doesn’t flinch; he’s been prepared for this conversation since they left Eadu’s atmosphere.

“Yes, she is,” he keeps his voice even, his expression professional and detached.

So does Draven. “The father?”

“Dead.”

Draven’s lips press thin for a moment, a tiny flicker of unhappiness which would surprise Cassian if he hadn’t spent the majority of his life working with the man. “Understood.”

“Our issued ship was destroyed on Eadu,” Kay pipes up in the ensuing silence. “We replaced it.”

Draven’s eyebrow lifts again. “Noted.”

“This one is bigger,” Kay adds.

Draven looks at Cassian, who merely looks back. “Yes,” Draven replies at length. “It is.” Then he shakes his head slightly, as if casting off the conversation. “Get cleaned up, Captain, and catch a meal in the mess hall if you can. You will be contacted shortly.” He turns sharply away and strides off without another word.

This does surprise Cassian, who was expecting – well, what Kay had told him to expect, of course. An order to prepare for the debriefing, or perhaps some kind of in-depth personal rundown of all his many failures in the last few weeks. “I’ll have my report submitted to the server by the end of the day cycle, sir,” Cassian almost calls to Draven’s retreating back.

Draven barely slows long enough to call back over his shoulder, “No need, Captain. Things are moving quicker now. Standby for further orders.” And then he’s marching around the nearest X-Wing, nearly sending a startled flight captain into a stack of crates as she comes around from the opposite side. 

“That was odd,” Kay says over Cassian’s head.

“Yes,” Cassian glances over his shoulder and notes that the hangar around the Imperial shuttle is now exclusively peopled with rebel techs and engineers, no robes or cannons or fiery green eyes in sight. Which of course he expected, and it does not make him feel bereft to notice. That would be utterly ridiculous. “He’s never told me to wait on a report before.”

“No, not that part,” Kay lifts his metal arms and drops them again, as close to a shrug as he can get with a rigid torso. “You didn’t tell him about the soulmarks.”

Cassian’s guts clench, and now he does flinch, too startled to hide it. “What?” He catches one of the techs glancing over at him, and spins on his heel to walk as calmly as he can away from the now-bustling spot in the hangar.

Kay keeps pace easily. “The presence and content of soulmarks is considered high-value information to any Intelligence agency. You are expected to report the exact nature of any marks you discover on an asset, contact, or enemy.”

“Ah,” Cassian clears his throat, keeps his voice low as they pass through the hangar and reach the door that will lead him towards the barracks. “And you are wondering why I didn’t tell him about the Jedhans’ marks?”

“And Jyn Erso’s, although I grant that we did not see hers, so we don’t know what it says or if she really has one. I think it’s unlikely that she lied about that, however.”

“So do I,” is all Cassian can think to say. His mouth feels dry for some reason, the weight of this conversation sitting uncomfortably on his chest.

“I need an oil bath,” Kay announces as they move past the meager security checkpoint to the barracks. “I still have fine-grit sand in some of my internal joints.” Vaguely, Cassian notes that there is now only one guard where there are normally two, and the second checkpoint further on is likewise reduced. Had they really started to run so low on personnel that they could no longer keep up the most basic infrastructure requirements? He wouldn’t really be surprised, the way the war has been going the last, oh, nine years or so.

He nods to Kay as they reach the corridor that splits off towards the nearest droid bay. Kay doesn’t bother with sentimental farewells or promises to meet back at Cassian’s quarters after his maintenance. He merely says “Goodbye,” and marches out of sight.

Cassian waves and calls out “See you later, Kay,” anyway. It never feels right, no matter how unnecessary Kay deems it, to part without saying _something_. An Imzig passing in the opposite direction gives him an odd look, but Cassian has never given a damn what anyone thinks about his treatment of a droid, so he ignores it and continues on the short distance to his current assigned quarters.

Why didn’t he tell Draven about the others’ soulmarks? He considers that he was merely waiting to put it in his report, but knows immediately that it’s a lie. He hadn’t been planning on mentioning the deeply personal but incredibly useful identifying marks in his report, and he’s not sure why.

Is it even a relevant part of the story? That Jyn Erso may or may not have a soulmate? That the two monks are bonded? That the former Imperial pilot seems to have lost his soulmate…or whatever it really means when a soulmark warps like that?

What _did_ it mean when a soulmark -

No, Cassian decides, slapping open the lock to his quarters and running a hand through his hair (his right hand, his numb right wrist brushing against his forehead). No, it isn’t relevant. The Jedhans are witnesses, or the closest thing he has to any. Their soulmates, or soulmarks, have nothing to do with the Death Star or the Empire’s plans. Jyn’s soulmark is her own. Whatever has caused Bodhi’s mark to bleed, or Chirrut’s to shadow in that strange way, or his own to crack and wither on his skin –

It’s not relevant. He doesn’t have time to look into it, anyway, nor the energy to spare. The Empire killed a planet with one blow, and he has to figure out how to make that seem real to people who didn’t see it happen. 

But first, a shower. His clothes are gritty against his skin, his hair feels greasy and tangled around his fingers, and every bone in his body aches. Cassian tugs at his collar and grimaces at the itchy sensation of his filthy shirt against his chest. Definitely a shower, then he can run to the mess hall for a bite – or perhaps just eat one of the ration bars he keeps in his footlocker. That will give him time to think about his report. Even if he doesn’t have time to submit it anywhere it will make a difference, it will help him organize the events in his head.

Briefly, he wonders where the others ended up, but he shoves the thought away as quickly as it comes.

It’s no longer his business, what happens to her. Or the Jedhans. He needs to focus now on convincing the rebel leadership that they must save the universe.

* * *

“So, um,” Bodhi clears his throat, clenching his hands tight together in what’s probably an attempt to keep them from shaking. “What now?”

Jyn glances around the hangar as they walk down the ramp of the stolen shuttle, and shrugs. She has no idea, and despite her fitful naps over the last two days it took to get here, she still feels…tired. Weighed down by the terrible mix of Eadu muck and her father’s blood that has dried on her boots and gloves. Her brain buzzes, caught between the residual anger and grief, flipping wildly between a desire to find a hidden corner to curl up in and the restless need to act. _It must be destroyed, Papa gasps in her arms, and Jyn says I know, I know, Papa I understand._

She comes to a halt at the end of the ramp, Bodhi stopping beside her, still twisting at his locked fingers as he watches the gathering crowd. Several steps away, Cassian and K2SO stand with their backs not quite turned, and while Kay’s optics could be trained anywhere as far as Jyn can tell, Cassian is watching the Alliance personnel rushing to meet them with a vague, thoughtful frown. Jyn turns back to the crowd to see what he’s looking at, but it’s just techies with their wrenches and their thermo-bars, pointing excitedly at various parts of the Imperial shuttle and nodding to one another as they chatter. None of them seem the slightest bit interested in the people disembarking, with the exception of a couple sideways glances at Bodhi’s ragged flightsuit. Jyn had expected more of a fuss about a Human in an Imperial uniform popping up in the middle of the Alliance’s headquarters. On the other hand, it is pretty filthy, and there is a chance these people just assume he’s some kind of undercover agent.

Or maybe it’s just that Bodhi, with his wide eyes and shaking hands, doesn’t register as enough of a threat to warrant special attention. Maybe the rebels will just ignore him, as they so easily ignore her. Which doesn’t help her figure out where they are supposed to go, or how she’s supposed to prod this bunch of political dissidents into taking action before it’s too late for them all. Jyn wonders briefly where she can find Mon Mothma, if the Senator is even on the base. Dimly, Jyn remembers the flowing white robes and silver chain of office from her childhood, how Mothma had usually stood quietly in the background making the occasional calm comment while Saw bellowed at Organa and Organa made icy remarks in turn. Organa hadn’t spoken to Jyn much when she was last on Yavin IV, and she has no idea if he even remembers her from her days with Saw, or if he does remember, perhaps he holds her in contempt because of it.

So, Mothma is her best bet, then. Does Mothma already know about the Death Star, and Jedha, and the end of the Partisans? Does she know that Saw is dead? Does she care? (Is she relieved?)

Jyn shakes herself, glaring at a rebel tech who bumps a little too close. The woman flaps a vaguely apologetic wave at her and moves back towards the shuttle. Bodhi catches Jyn’s eye as she edges further away from the crowd and offers a shaky smile, but he is clearly at just as much of a loss as her as they stand awkwardly in the noise and bustle of the hangar.

Chirrut, on the other hand, has no such problem. “Ah, excellent,” he says cheerfully, sweeping past them down the ramp and heading around the far end of the ship as if he has been here a thousand times before. “I was hoping we would not have to wait for you.” He is around the corner and out of sight in a moment, Baze clumping steadily behind him. Bodhi follows, keeping a careful distance between himself and the mercenary (even after a few days cooped up together, Bodhi is unusually nervous around Baze, and Jyn hasn’t pried). Jyn glances back to the other side of the shuttle, but Cassian is still focused entirely on the crowd. So, bereft of any better ideas, she marches after the Jedhans.

Around the corner, she nearly runs into Baze’s broad back, and has to dodge to the side to see what has stopped him.

Two Humans in Alliance uniforms stand with their arms crossed in front of them. The shorter one, Human fem, black hair, scar on her lip and impressively built shoulders, watches them with an impassive expression. The taller one, Human male, buzzed dark hair and wiry build, looks familiar for some reason. The scowl on his face, however, sets her teeth on edge. Especially because the guard seems to have zeroed in on Bodhi, who is doing his best to stand tall and stare back.

Vaguely, Jyn registers an insistent itch flare up on her leg, but she clenches her fists and ignores it. Now is not a good time to think about her messed up soulmark.

“Our escorts,” Chirrut says loudly, smiling. “How wonderful of the Alliance to provide us with two!”

But Jyn notes the way the impassive guard scans both Chirrut, Baze, and Jyn with only the briefest professional interest – it’s clear that these armed soldiers did not come out here to corral a couple of monks and a common criminal. _This time_ , her brain adds to that thought, abruptly recognizing the scowling male guard as the one who had dragged her around this base weeks ago, when she was brought here from Wobani. From the way the scowler glares at her face for a moment before turning his fierce stare back to Bodhi, he recognizes her, too, and is just as unimpressed with her this time around as the last.

“You will come with us,” the scowler says to Bodhi, his grey eyes flicking to the still-visible Imperial crest on Bodhi’s faded flightsuit.

“Of course, of course,” Chirrut agrees before anyone else can react. “What do you think,” he turns his head towards Baze, his face a picture of thoughtful good humor. “A good meal first?”

“Sonic shower,” Baze grunts.

The impassive guard raises an eyebrow fractionally, the edges of her stare softening into something that looks a bit like amusement. Her rank badge, Jyn notes, is similar to some of the techs, and they all seem to be enlisted. The scowler, however, has an officer rank badge. A lieutenant, she thinks Cassian called him, weeks ago when he transferred custody of her over to the spy. So, whatever the impassive guard thinks of Chirrut’s intervention, it’s the scowler’s reaction that will determine what happens to Bodhi in the next few minutes.

Jyn’s eye catches on the shackles hanging from the lieutenant’s belt. They look exactly the way she remembers them.

Her jaw tightens, her fists curl.

“You’re not going to stay with us,” Scowler says flatly. He seems ready to continue, probably to order them all – or at least Bodhi – to hold out their wrists or submit to a search. But Chirrut speaks again, tapping his staff against the floor in a slow, patient cadence.

“Of course we are. That is the point of an escort. However, after several days in a small ship, I admit that we are all perhaps a little…” he makes a show of sniffling, and then raising one elegant hand to his nose in a delicate gesture. “Fragrant.”

The impassive guard is definitely smirking now, though Jyn can see her trying to hide it. She guesses that despite his joking tone, Chirrut isn’t as far off the mark as she’d like to admit. The Imperial ship wasn’t a long-hauler, so the tiny ‘fresher hadn’t been equipped with a sonic. Jyn’s nose is probably just dull to the stink of multiple bodies in close quarters at this point.

Fortunately, Scowler seems to reluctantly agree. Without a further word, he turns on his heel and marches towards the north side of the temple structure. Jyn compares his direction to her most recent memory of Yavin, and yes, that does line up with where he took her last time to wash up after her interrogation.

Last time, though, he was under orders to give her gear and then give her to Cassian. This time…

If he reaches for those shackles, Jyn decides, she’s going to break his square jaw. But that would bring all kinds of repercussions down on her, and while she’s in the mood to maybe fight a squad or two, she’s not sure how that would affect Bodhi. Or her ability to speak to Mothma, for that matter. Shite.

Jyn ponders the conundrum all the way to the sonics, and takes an even faster scrub this time than she did before, not even bothering to strip. She grits her teeth for the required thirty seconds the sonic needs to break down the grime, only bothering to strip off her boots and trousers to stretch them out under the cleanser plates. Whatever her stench, she has to get the muck of Eadu off her clothing. She just…has to. She doesn’t look at her marked leg as she undresses and redresses, pointedly ignoring the way it pulses and throbs. She’s not sure why it started acting up the moment she stepped out of the shuttle, but she doesn’t have the time for it right now. 

In the stall next to her, she hears Bodhi shuffling and clanking around, hears him shaking out the flightsuit and then a moment of silence before the rustling of material tells her that he’s putting it back on again. She wonders why he doesn’t just ask for something else to wear. They may not give it to him, but then, surely more than a few of the people here were once Imperial citizens too? They couldn’t all have joined at the tender age of six…

She’s not thinking about it. It’s not her business.

A strange hissing noise from her opposite side startles Jyn, and then she realizes that stray droplets of water are spitting up and falling on her from over the stall wall on her other side. “Ah, I seem to have found the water settings!” Chirrut calls.

“Jungle planet,” Baze’s voice is further down, and no less impressed than ever. “Lots of water around here.”

“I hope there is also a dryer,” Chirrut answers, sounding delighted despite the slap of wet fabric being slung against the stall walls. “Or that one of our new friends is prepared to follow me with a mop.”

Jyn walks out of her stall in time to see the enlisted guard coughing into her fist, biting back a smile. Scowler merely stands next to Bodhi’s stall with his arms crossed, though his grey eyes follow her as she passes him. Jyn bristles under his attention, and for a moment she wants to snap at him that it’s not her fault she’s not a devoted rebel like him. She fought in their damn war for years, even before she understood what it was about, until the rebellion threw _her_ out.

The words burn in her throat, and it’s not just the sheer stupidity of wanting to tell some total stranger her whole life’s story that surprises her. It’s also the sudden overwhelming sense of wrongness in her chest, the flare of a terrible itching sensation in her leg, and the way Scowler’s eyes seem to bore into her, accusing and angry and just…just…

He must see her answering rage, or at least he sees something that puts him on his guard, and she’ll give him this at least, the man is fast. His hand flies to his belt, to the shock truncheon hanging there - but then he freezes, watching her. Unbidden, Jyn feels the snarl taking specific shape in her mouth, _I didn’t sign up for your rebellion_ , and for a moment she imagines spitting it in his face, just finally letting go and ripping into this stranger who looks at her like she’s somehow less than him for being what she is, for living the life she’s lived. For a moment she imagines following up the verbal attack with a physical one, slamming her fist into his face and ripping those shackles from his belt. She doesn’t know why, but she’s certain that it would be so. Damn. Satisfying.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jyn sees the enlisted guard shift her weight. It’s a subtle move, but Jyn recognizes a combat stance when she sees one. It’s similar to the stance the scowling lieutenant has taken, too – they probably belong to the same unit. It takes her a moment to parse through her mental registry of various combat styles associated with the Alliance, but eventually she recalls one of Saw’s lessons about, about, what were they called? Trailfinders? Pathfinders.

So, Bodhi doesn’t just rate a couple Alliance guards, he gets _Pathfinders_. For that matter, so does she.

She’s beaten Pathfinders before.

“Um. Do you need, need a towel?” Bodhi’s voice is still jittery, but the wavering uncertainty she’s come to associate with him seems to have steadied. Jyn turns to look over her shoulder, and sees the pilot standing in front of Chirrut’s stall, resolutely facing the curtain but turned so that he can see the quiet standoff happening a few steps away. “Chirrut? I can, um, I can look for a towel.”

“That,” Chirrut says with exaggerated dignity, “would be appreciated.”

In the next stall, Baze gives a gruff bark of laughter. “Let him drip,” he calls. “Easier to track him.”

Bodhi turns to the guards, his hands spread out in sheepish entreaty. Jyn notes that they are no longer shaking, although there is still something a little fractured in Bodhi’s gaze, as if he’s only partially looking out at the world, the rest of his attention turned inwards to somewhere shadowed.

“Supply closet’s just down the hall,” the impassive guard says into the tense silence. She meets the scowler’s eye. “I’ll run and grab a couple, sir.”

He nods, still frowning at Jyn. She lets him, staring back without blinking for a long moment. Her leg itches like fire now, and her throat feels tight, but she won’t pick a fight with him. Maybe if Bodhi wasn’t on the line, if her father’s terrible creation wasn’t looming somewhere overhead, if she didn’t need the Alliance to listen to her so badly -

But Bodhi is at risk, the Death Star does exist, and Jyn is no longer willing to ignore her part in the Empire’s greatest monstrosity. She just…can’t.

So she keeps her mouth shut and turns to follow the impassive guard out of the sonic. “I’ll help,” she says flatly when the Pathfinder glances over. She shrugs, and leads them both out into the hall.

Behind her, the scowler mutters something in a voice too low for her to understand the words. Jyn ignores the impulse to go back in and demand he repeat himself.

“He’s not so bad,” the impassive guard says as they walk down the hall.

Jyn startles and turns to look at her. The guard, Pathfinder, whatever, jerks her head back towards the sonics. “Lieutenant Kovani. He’s a good soldier and a nice guy, once you get to know him.”

“A nice guy,” Jyn repeats with flat disbelief, because in her opinion those words belonged on absolutely no one who carried shackles on his belt.

But the Pathfinder merely flicks a dismissive hand. “He’s got strong opinions. Makes him a bit of an ass sometimes. But he takes care of his people and he fights the Empire for good reasons.”

Low standards, Jyn thinks uncharitably but doesn’t say out loud. This Pathfinder may not be carrying shackles, but she’s still got a shock truncheon and a good combat stance, and beating her up will only reduce the chances that Jyn will get anywhere near an Alliance leader, let alone Mothma herself.

Still, this Pathfinder is not likely to stop Scowler from clamping Bodhi in binders the moment he’s tired of playing Chirrut’s diplomatic little game. Jyn needs to figure out a better plan than “wait around and see what the angry rebel does to the former Imperial.”

Cassian, she thinks, as the Pathfinder unlocks the supply closet and starts shoving haphazard boxes aside in her hunt for shower supplies. Captain Cassian Andor outranks a lieutenant.

He’s barely spoken to her since Eadu, since they plunged their verbal knives into each other’s chests. He’s barely even looked at her, an impressive feat considering the size of the ship they had been on for days. But he won’t let them shackle Bodhi. He may be a passive tool of his superior officers _(I had every chance to pull the trigger)_ but he’s not the kind of person to ignore pointless suffering when he can so anything about it.

She might be wrong about that, of course. She’s been wrong about people before, always with painful consequences. If she’s wrong about him, it will hurt like a banthafucker.

An image of Bodhi in shackles makes her stomach twist. Chirrut and Baze similarly bound or held at blaster point isn’t much better.

He won’t let that happen. She has to believe that, or she has nothing but her fists and her rage and her helplessness in the face of the Death Star’s continued existence.

“I’ll meet you in the mess hall,” Jyn tells the guard abruptly, and turns sharply to march down the corridor before the other woman can respond. She sets her shoulders and strains her hearing behind her, waiting for the telltale snap of a shock truncheon igniting, or the shift in air pressure as a body rushes at her back.

Nothing. The Pathfinder lets her go.

Jyn turns the corner and immediately starts hunting for a console. She doesn’t have an access badge or an account on the Alliance network, of course, but that sort of thing has never stopped her before. She only needs to hack into the common base files and find his assigned quarters, a simple task judging by what she remembers of Alliance coding.

The hard part will be when she actually gets to his door and has to think of something to say.

 _Attack one objective at a time_ , a voice that sounds suspiciously like Saw reminds her. Jyn checks that her kyber crystal is tucked safely out of sight, and then sets her shoulders and strides through the Alliance headquarters like she belongs there, hunting for a console.

She hopes he will...that he will at least...

Well. She hopes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Oh hey it's that guy again, that angry lieutenant that Jyn almost talks to and then doesn't.)


	7. don't look back those days are gone

Cassian always takes care to be particularly friendly and accommodating to the often overworked and underpaid quartermaster shop. The first reason is a necessity; one of the weakest spots in any military for enemy spies to exploit is the supply chain, where an enemy agent can both tally up exactly how many resources the military has available, sabotage gear at will, and worse yet, ply the quartermasters themselves for information. Quartermasters are always in the headquarters, they hear all the gossip, see all the people passing in and out, and in Cassian's experience, every last one of them gossips like a Corellian hen. The Alliance is thin on dedicated counter-intelligence agents (thin on everything, these days), so Cassian makes a point of keeping his finger on the pulse of the quartermaster stations on each base he frequent, as much as he possibly can. The more the quartermaster personnel like and trust him, the easier it is to assess them for any security breaches.

The second reason is purely selfish, and one of the few indulgences he allows himself. The quartermasters like and trust Captain Andor, so when he checks in to the base, Captain Andor gets a decent room with a tiny but entirely private ‘fresher. With a _shower_.

As soon as he’s finished double-checking his gear for trackers, Cassian walks directly into it. Yavin IV is understaffed, undersupplied, and underfunded on just about every single level, but water it has in abundance. He turns the temperature high, much higher than normal (the sensation of cold water falling on his skin is unbearable at the moment) and then he stands perfectly still for several long moments. He allows himself a brief moment to look at his right arm, to prod the grey marks that scatter around the sharp bones of his wrist and up the lean muscles of his forearm. The numb sensation has faded, and they still look as grey and cracked and dead as ever, but they throb under his fingertip as if they were fresh bruises. He hasn’t felt anything like that from them in a long time. Not that he’s bothered to check, really. His soulmate has become less of a wound and more of an irrelevancy, just some unfortunate personal problem to be overcome in order to function within the parameters of his job. Some agents have amputations, or prominent scars that have to be hidden so as not to make them easily identifiable. Cassian has the fragmented reminder of a promise the Force once made on his behalf, which Cassian has purposefully broken. He looked it up, on the long trip from Eadu to Yavin IV. There are whole databases in the galaxy devoted to this sort of thing, research grants on several of the wealthier worlds, along with thousands of mystics, spiritual leaders, or even blatant charlatans swearing they knew the secrets of the inexplicable bonds formed between complete strangers. In every known case of a soulmate dying before they met their match, the soulmark words always faded completely from the mate’s skin. Possibly the records are incomplete or heavily biased to Core worlds – in fact, Cassian is almost certain of it. But in the long dark hours of the flight from Eadu, he had not been able to find even a single anecdotal record of someone discovering their mate was dead where the words _hadn’t_ vanished.

So, it’s probably safe to assume that since there are remnants on Cassian’s skin, his soulmate is still alive. He wonders what would happen if he ran across them now. Would the words heal on his skin, once his soulmate spoke them aloud? If he went back to Fest and sought out the miners, spoke to them in the old tunnel-slang, would anyone answer in the language he could barely read around the curve of his wrist? Or had he already _met_ his mate, but he had been someone else at the time, and so, not recognizing him, his mate didn't say what the Force expected them to say, and so his mark is broken and -

 _Soulmarks are just words, and words change all the time_.

Well. In that, at least, he and Jyn Erso are in agreement. Cassian closes his eyes and lets his arm drop, sets aside the feel of fresh bruises and regret. It’s an idle line of thinking anyway. He can no more leave the rebellion and run back to Fest to look for some stranger than he can kill the Emperor with a wish, or resurrect Jyn’s father. Or his own father, for that matter.

Cassian refocuses his mind away from broken soulmarks and lost parents and Jyn Erso's bitter disappointment. He does the breathing exercises he learned on the firing range, sniper rifle tucked against his cheek and the noise of the base fading in the background, inhale, aim, fire. Inhale, aim, fire. There is nothing else to think about except the rise and fall of his chest. One two three fire _._ The past is dead and the future hasn’t been born. One two three fire. There is only now and how the air pulls smoothly in and pushes smoothly out. One two three –

His door buzzes.

Cassian sighs, turns the water off and reaches for his towel. “Standby,” he calls out the ‘fresher door, which he hasn’t bothered to shut. His boots are propped against the bottom of the door, so he can’t see any shadow moving under the thin gap (and no one on the other side can see his shadow when he walks around his room), but he still gets a vague sense of someone standing on the other side of the cheap pre-fab door. Cassian rubs the water from his skin as efficiently as he can and drags a hand through his wet hair. It’s probably a runner from Draven. Cassian’s a little surprised to get a call-in already. Draven said things would move fast, but in Cassian’s experience politicians move at the speed of bureaucracy, which is roughly as fast as molasses on Hoth.

Perhaps they are taking the destruction of Jedha and the reality of the Death Star better than he expects. Perhaps the Council is reacting to the destruction and horror of Jedha City with outrage and action rather than terror and dithering. Cassian yanks on his trousers and shirt as fast as he can and tries not to hope too hard.

He sweeps his boots to the side of the door with one foot and keys it open, still swiping at a few drops of water on his face –

His first thought is _and so it ends like this, abrupt and violent_.

His second thought is _she must have hacked a console to find my room._

He doesn’t have time for a third thought, because Jyn Erso is stomping past him and turning on her heel in the center of his cramped quarters, her arms crossed and her lips pressed into a thin, angry line. Her eyes flick from his bare feet to his wet hair, though if she thinks anything of his informal appearance, it doesn’t show on her face. She does raise her chin when he meets her gaze, her shoulders tightening and her weight shifting subtly. It’s more of a defensive stance than an offensive one, although Cassian can tell she’s trying to hide that, too. The instinctive twisting fear in his guts slowly eases as she refrains from lunging across the room and impaling him with the vibroblade he can see tucked into the top of her boot. He waits a beat longer, just in case, but all she does is stand in the middle of his room and glower silently, waiting for him to figure out what is happening.

He supposes that if she were here to kill him, she’d have done it by now.

Cassian closes the door and turns to face her.

“Is Bodhi a prisoner?” Her voice is low, and Cassian can easily hear the silent note that adds _he better not be._

It only takes a moment for Cassian to understand what must have happened. Civilian refugees are not uncommon on the base, nor are defectors from the Imperial military – it would be a sorry rebellion if they turned away anyone who offered to fight simply because they hadn’t been a perfect rebel from the start. But typically those refugees came in larger, easier to identify groups (and weren’t so alarmingly armed with cannons ripped from _tanks_ ). And typically the defectors had the good sense (or ability) to change out of their Imperial uniforms before walking into the heart of the Rebellion. Someone with enough clout must have taken exception to an Imperial flightsuit and a couple of armed strangers. If he had to guess, he’d say it was the Pathfinders, who supplement base security as much as possible between their own field missions.

“No,” Cassian shrugs, closing the top buttons of his shirt as casually as he can manage in an attempt to hide his pounding pulse from Jyn’s searching stare. “Do you have the name of his guards?”

“Lieutenant Kovani,” she supplies immediately, although he sees her frown turn a little surprised around the edges, as if she expected him to argue or shrug her off. He supposes he earned that, on Eadu. He hunts through his memory of Yavin’s personnel roster, but the name doesn’t jump out at him. Not an Intelligence agent, certainly, and not any of the permanent base security officers, nor the main hangar chiefs. No one from Analysis or Communications would look even remotely like a threat to Jyn, so he was probably right to assume that Kovani is a –

“Pathfinder,” Jyn adds at almost the exact moment Cassian comes to that solution.

He nods and turns to the bunk, which is still covered in all his gear spread out after his thorough check for trackers. His primary comm link is already synced to the base frequencies, and he scrolls through Intel’s global address system to open the Pathfinder records. He doesn’t need the full personnel file, just the top-level records, so it only take a moment to find what he’s looking for. Lieutenant Kovani, Pathfinder, second platoon of Team Wildfire, requested and granted Base Security clearances, two minor infractions for fighting on base, strong anti-Imperial opinions (not as common a file-marker in the Alliance as Cassian would like), no known medical conditions.

Jyn is still watching him, silent and immobile in the center of his room, her attention brushing against his neck like the point of a dagger. Cassian clears his throat and dials the lieutenant’s personal comm, making certain to add his clearance codes so that the Pathfinder’s comm link will tell him the name and rank of the caller. As the comm goes through, Cassian flicks his thumb across the base of the link to turn it to speaker, so that Jyn can hear the whole conversation.

“Captain,” says a brisk voice over the comm. In the background, Cassian hears the distorted sound someone warbling what sounds like a Jedhan folk song. “This is Pathfinder Kovani. What do you need?” The singing in the background pitches up for a moment, and then back down. Cassian isn’t sure, but he thinks he hears a faint scratching sound close to the mic, as if Kovani has swallowed back a displeased grunt.

“Lieutenant,” Cassian turns his own voice as formal and commanding as he can. “I understand you are assisting our Jedhan contacts prepare for their debrief.”

A few steps away, Jyn’s mouth twists out of a pinched frown into something softer, something almost like –

Cassian swallows and refuses to smile back, and is glad a moment later that he didn’t, because she wipes the expression from her face with an almost guilty speed.

Meanwhile, he can almost hear Kovani struggling with the implications of Cassian’s words. “Yes, sir,” the Pathfinder says after a moment. The warbling swoops up again, and yes, it’s definitely Jedhan words floating on the unusual tune. Cassian doesn’t know the Jedhan language beyond rudimentary phrases, but he knows an annoyance tactic when he hears it. He hopes that the Pathfinder hasn’t actually put shackles on Bodhi (or Chirrut for that matter, no matter how loudly he sings). Judging by the way Jyn’s fingers are still clenched against her folded arms, if the Pathfinder has gone that far then singing monks will be the least of the man’s worries.

Cassian raises an eyebrow at Jyn, waits until she cocks her head to the side to show that she is listening. “Good,” he tells the lieutenant, and now he lets his tone turn absent, an officer busy with something far more important than the rudimentary orders he is handing down. “Show them the facilities to clean up and get some food, and then make sure they are issued working comm links so they can be contacted when necessary. You may return to your duties at that point.”

Jyn’s mouth twists into an unexpected smile again, and this time she has to drop Cassian’s gaze and look away while she resettles her face back into her normal reserve. Cassian takes care to keep any satisfaction from showing on his own face; she would probably read it as mockery.

“But sir,” the Pathfinder protests, then the comm link buzzes with static as he catches himself. Cassian will give the Pathfinders one thing – they can be fanatical, obsessive, volatile people with varying levels of social graces, but they are never undisciplined. General Madine picks them carefully.

Still, he doesn’t want the soldier to say anything impolitic and put the wary frown back on Jyn’s face, so he ices his own voice over slightly and responds, “Yes, Lieutenant?” He puts a slight emphasis on the rank, too, reminding the Pathfinder that he’s speaking to a superior officer (not that rank has ever meant much to Rebel Intelligence, but it means a great deal to small combat teams on the ground, when the chaos of battle demands very clear lines of authority to be drawn).

“Understood, Captain.” The Pathfinder does not sound subdued, but neither does he seem likely to protest any more. Instead, he retreats into brisk professionalism. “I will send their comm link codes to you as soon as they have been issued.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. Carry on.”

Cassian ends the link, and for lack of any better ideas starts to repack his gear back into his pack. It gives his hands something to do, and helps distract him from the sudden realization that he is half-dressed and still damp from his shower roughly three steps away from Jyn Erso.

“Thanks,” she says softly, and he mentally corrects _three_ to _two_. Did she move closer while he was talking to the Pathfinder? How did he miss that?

“Of course,” he replies in a tone just as soft, before catching himself. “He’s not a prisoner. Technically,” he shrugs his shoulders, slides the macrobinoculars back into their designated pouch in the inside of the pack, “neither were you, when you first came here.”

“Technically,” she echoes in a dry tone. “Someone probably should have told that to the guards who put the shackles on me.”

He snorts, because that first meeting might have gone vastly different if only someone had done exactly that.

“I almost didn’t come,” Jyn says abruptly, derailing his thoughts.

Cassian freezes, the edges of his spare ammo pack biting into his fingers. “What?”

Jyn’s arms are still crossed tightly across her chest, but she turns to look down at the gear still spread out on his bunk. She scans over his vibroblade and the three different wallets he carries, each of them chosen to imply a different social class, but he doesn’t think she really sees them. Her mouth has turned down at the corners again, pinched and unhappy. A strand of her hair has slipped free from her bun and hangs awkwardly against her ear; he ruthlessly shoves the ammo pack into it’s pocket in the backpack to stop himself from doing something foolish like reaching over to brush it back.

“I thought,” Jyn pauses, tries again, “I worried that you wouldn’t – “

“That I wouldn’t care,” he finishes for her, because it’s so painfully true. He sounds angry even to his own ears, and he closes his eyes for a moment to get his unruly emotions back under control. “I’m sorry,” he starts, then stops. Is he? For what? Does it matter?

He doesn’t know anymore.

Jyn unfolds her arms and reaches down to the bunk, picking up the fur lining of his blue jacket. He’d unsnapped it from the jacket after Eadu, hanging it up to dry it out separately from the heavy material of the jacket shell, and then he’d bundled it back up and stuffed it in the pack without much care. As a result, the furry side is matted in places, dried into awkward clumps. Jyn rakes her fingers through it almost absently, fluffing the fur back up until it looks less bedraggled. “Me too,” she says at last, and turns to hand him the jacket lining.

It occurs to Cassian, as he reaches out to accept it, that she doesn’t look any more certain what she means than he does. She looks down at his hands as he grabs it, and her gaze catches on his wrist.

Cassian stills, his fingers around the jacket lining barely a centimeter from hers, and Jyn startles as she realizes that he hasn’t pulled back. She jerks back, her eyes flying up, and there’s a mild flush in her cheeks. She’s embarrassed to be caught staring, and for some reason Cassian suddenly wants to laugh.

He can’t explain later why he does it – can’t even explain it to himself right now – but some impulse burns through his veins too strong to ignore, so Cassian tosses the lining down on the bunk again and rolls up his sleeve.

Jyn looks at his bared forearm, at the cracked grey marks that mar his skin, and then up at his face. Her eyes are wide and startlingly green in the fluorescent light of his quarters, and the unhappy tension in her mouth eases into astonishment. It is no little thing to show someone a soulmark, not even in the most open-minded cultures. Some never show it to anyone except immediate family and the soulmate themself. Cassian has willingly shown his mark to exactly one person since he was a child, and Kay only wanted to see it so he could properly register Cassian’s 'identifying features' in his own tightly-secured memory bank.

Yet here Cassian stands, his shirt sleeve rolled up to his elbow and a broken fragment of his soul in full view of someone he’s known less than a month. “It’s in Festi,” he tells her, because apparently he’s gone insane at last, cracked under the pressure of Jedha and Eadu and the monstrous weapon that the Empire has unleashed. “A lower class dialect. Barely anyone even speaks it anymore.”

Jyn's gaze tracks over the marks, and he tenses when she opens her mouth again, braces for the question he’s not sure he can bear to answer. But all she says is, “I’ve never been to Fest.”

And then she sits down on his bunk in the newly cleared space and leans over, tugging at her boot.

Cassian hesitates, but to all appearances Jyn ignores him. She yanks off her boot and then her thick woolly sock (the sock has a hole in the heel and a worn spot on the ball of the foot, not quite torn open but threatening to; idly Cassian thinks that the quartermasters always keep a few crates of spare socks on hand, before he heads to Command perhaps he can swing by). He knows what she’s doing, of course, but it still takes him a moment to really believe it. Why would she show him this vulnerability, this destiny that Fate or the Force or whatever grand designer of the universe has left on her skin?

Possibly for the same reason he rolled up his sleeve. Maybe she’s cracking under the strain of the last month, under the madness of the war and their broken, violent lives. Maybe it's some kind of peace offering, or she feels like she owes him this now that he's shown her the mark on his own skin.

Maybe it’s only that Jyn, like Cassian, just wants someone to _see_.

She pulls the trouser leg up to her knee, and then sits back up, her hands clenched in her lap.

Slowly, cautiously, Cassian moves his pack from the bunk to the floor and sits down next to her, propping his elbows on his knees and looking down at her bared leg.

It’s a mass of writhing green, the long, twisting lines covered in bristling brown-tipped thorns that obscure any pattern. He thinks he can make out a “c” and perhaps an “m,” but it’s just as possible that this language isn’t even Basic and those shapes are something else entirely. When Jyn had told Bodhi that her mark changed, Cassian had assumed she meant changed like _his_ , dead and dried up. Instead, her mark makes him think of some exotic plant bursting into full bloom under her skin, twining around her ankle and climbing her shin like a trellis.

“It’s hideous, I know.” Her voice is hostile, almost challenging, which makes no sense given that she’s shown him this unasked.

Cassian knows a defense mechanism when he hears it, though, so he doesn’t take offense. He raises his head and meets her eyes. “I’m surprised,” he says at last, keeping his voice mild as possible. Her face darkens, shoulders drawn up and jaw tense, but he continues in the same thoughtful tone, “You haven’t added any flowers.”

She blinks, the hostility faltering. “Flowers,” she repeats flatly.

He shrugs, jerks his chin towards her leg. “There are people who pay a lot of money for intricate tattoos that size. Add some flowers to it, no one would know it was anything but an elaborate decoration. Gang tattoo, maybe. Or vanity mark.”

Jyn’s stare shifts from him to her leg, then back to him, and Cassian is careful not to appear amused. He really doesn’t want her to think that he’s mocking her, and he’s not sure he could explain his sudden good humor in any way that wouldn’t sound condescending or cruel. It’s just… she’s obviously never thought of _adding_ to the mark, or even just disguising it. She must have thought of her soulmark the same way he thinks of his own – a sign of failure, a weakness, a chain looped around him when he was a child and never really shaken off.

“Flowers,” she says again in a soft tone, a hint of wistfulness in her voice that makes Cassian’s chest ache, makes his bare arm feel cold, makes the skin along his collarbone itch with the sudden sense memory of her lips brushing briefly against –

He bites the inside of his cheek to ground himself back to the here and now.

“It says - ” Jyn’s voice catches, she turns her face away from him abruptly. Cassian looks down at his hands, giving her all the space he can in this tiny room. “I guess it doesn’t matter what it says,” she finishes after a moment, and he is surprised at the lack of bitterness in her words. He looks up to see her watching him with an expression he can’t read, and for a wild moment he finds himself hunting through his memory of their first meeting, what _was_ the first thing that he…?

Jyn sighs, leans down and shoves at her trouser leg to resettle it. Cassian shakes his head while she looks away, irritated and ashamed of himself. It’s selfish of him, to hope for even a moment that she would have his words when he definitely does not have hers. He’s heard of such things, of course, people marked for someone who is marked for someone else, and it’s generally associated with terrible stigma and cultural backlash. What kind of story would that be? _And so the poor woman was doomed to be bound to a lover marked for another, both of them always wondering if today would be the day he heard the words he was meant to hear in a voice that was not hers..._

The shame of his momentary thoughts burns in Cassian’s throat like bile; what kind of person is he to even hope - ?

But he knows that. Worse, so does she. They’ve already lived through that story, haven’t they? _Cold rain on his skin and the numb sensation of stone pressing against his forearm as he balanced the rifle, the tint of the sniper scope turning dark eyes to green as he centered the crosshairs on the scientist’s head. You lied to me, she snarled, and he could not deny it. Didn’t even want to._

The worst part is that he’s not entirely sure why his lie on Eadu even registered as a betrayal to her. For all the time they’ve been together, for all that they worked so well together in Jedha, fought side by side and lived in close quarters for days without incident…he’s never technically been on her side. Warden, spy, assassin, Alliance soldier - all things that she had every reason to mistrust. She should have simply assumed he was lying when he told her to stay behind on Eadu. She had no business thinking better of him. He had no right to expect her to trust him at all.

But she did, and so did he.

He’s tired of being the villain in her story.

“On Chandrila,” he says suddenly into the silence as Jyn reties her boot tightly around her ankle, “they have big parties when someone discovers a soulmark on their body.”

“Parties?” Jyn sits up and wrinkles her nose at him (which he does not find cute at all, because that would be ridiculous, not to mention presumptuous). “They…tell people? Even _strangers?”_

She sounds so scandalized that for a moment Cassian’s control slips and he chuckles before he catches himself. “That’s more of a trend among the wealthier classes. The lower classes just have a little ceremony at home with family and close friends.”

“Rich people,” Jyn rolls her eyes, leans back and rests her weight on her hands. It’s the most open, relaxed body language he’s ever seen from her, and she seems to realize it at the same moment he does because her body tenses. She doesn’t move, though, a stubborn set to her jaw telling him that she thinks curling back up into her defensive posture will make her look weak.

He turns on the edge of the bed and leans back against the wall behind the pillow, propping his ankle on his opposite knee and rolling his shoulders back and down. It takes him a moment, but he forces his body into something almost as relaxed as her pose, as if it's never even occurred to him that she might want to hurt him. “Sometimes,” he adds conversationally, as if they are fond acquaintances having a pleasant chat, as if nothing about this entire situation is sending his heart racing in his chest. As if he is not watching her muscles slowly relax like it’s the greatest thing he’s accomplished in months. “Sometimes they even take partial holos of the mark and put it on the invitations.”

“ _Partial_ holos,” Jyn tilts her head. “Oh. So no one can see the whole phrase and then say it when they show up.”

“It’s happened before,” Cassian lets his head lean back and rest against the wall. He doesn’t miss the way Jyn’s eyes flick to his exposed throat, nor the way she shifts her weight to let her legs stretch out in front of her, no longer braced to leap up and stride out the door.

“I bet. ‘S a good way to get an inheritance quick, show up at some snob’s party and shout their heir’s soulwords before anyone else has the chance.”

“A smart person would try to be a little more romantic than that, but yes, that’s more or less the problem.”

Jyn laughs, a quiet, choked-off sound followed by a furtive glance at the door as if she’s checking that no one’s peering in at them. (Force help him, but he knows what _that’s_ like, to be so accustomed to hiding his emotions that it’s instinctively frightening to display them even in a relatively private place. The more he learns of her, the more he sees...he sees...)

(Well.)

“People are always talking about how romantic soulmarks are,” Jyn jitters her marked leg a little, scowling at her knee, “I don’t even know what that _means_.”

“No,” he agrees, and this time he doesn’t even care that his voice has fallen low and soft again. “Neither do I.”

They lapse into silence again, but Cassian feels no compulsion to fill it. It’s not entirely comfortable, this quiet, but it is somewhat insulating. He can hear the hum of the air filter, the muffled sounds of people moving past them out in the corridor, and the irregular faint sounds of ship engines roaring in and out of the distant hangar. In the hushed silence of his small, isolated room, the awkwardness of her arrival has vanished. The hostility of their last conversation on the stolen ship seems so long ago that it’s almost absurd to think of it. Everything, even the explosions of Jedha and Eadu, the stink of Kafrene, the desperation of Operation Fracture and every place it’s taken him, every heartbreak it’s dragged him through (every horror it promises to inflict on him in the future)…it all feels far away outside the stone and plas-steel walls of this small, sheltered space.

Time seems to stretch and empty around them, and Cassian lets his muscles genuinely relax until his forced posture becomes natural. Eventually, Jyn murmurs something about getting a bite to eat in the mess, and when Cassian makes a vague joke about the quality of the meals, demands to know what he would consider acceptable food. Somehow, this devolves into a discussion of Mid Rim spice combinations (he maintains that the Mid Rim savory blends are far superior even to Core world gourmet, which clearly Jyn doubts but doesn’t directly refute), smuggling techniques on the Lantillian Trade Route (Jyn claims the pirates around Onderon have a higher percentage of success running Imperial blockades than anywhere else in the galaxy, but Cassian refuses to accept that claim without hard data), and the use of purggil routes as spice smuggling paths (in this, they agree: incredibly stupid). 

The conversation rises and falls in fits and starts; it’s clear to Cassian that neither of them really know what they are doing, and just as clear that neither want to stop. He reasons that there’s nowhere for her to go and nothing for him to do, so perhaps this is the best way they could be spending their time, waiting for the Council to gather, waiting for the other boot to drop. At some point they begin trading stories, and Cassian can think of a lot of things significantly worse than Jyn Erso’s smirk as she tells him about a job involving a stolen statue, a ship full of rotten flowers, and the worst dejarik player in galactic history ( _and that’s why I can’t stand the smell of wet Wookiee, even after all this time_ ). In turn, he tells her about hiding from an Imperial lockdown by making friends with a Tognath brothel owner and her sympathetic workers ( _in the end, they told me to keep the sweater, and the only payment they wanted was my recipe for the cookies_ ). They avoid the uglier tales, the close calls, the backstabbing contacts, the failed missions and the jobs that didn’t pan out. He can hear the shadow of her bad days in the things Jyn doesn’t say, and he knows she can see his own in the careful way he schools his face as he glosses over the less appealing parts of his stories. But they don’t comment on it, and the relief is almost overwhelming. Cassian finds himself relaxing into the rhythm of the stories, the interesting way that Jyn can say more with an expression than she can with a monologue, the pleasant feeling of letting his hands move through the air as he speaks.

 _And so,_ he tells her, _the Rodians ended up getting their shipment,_ _but because they were so impatient, they had to pay the full fee to the smuggler anyway._

 _I never did get the chance to punch the smug arsehole_ , she grimaces with resigned irritation, _but I did get a pretty good price for his fancy custom speeder in the next port._

In the back of his mind, Cassian wonders briefly if he’s spoken this many words as _himself_ , not under a mask or on a mission, in the last five months combined.

Probably better not to think about it.

“I thought about burning it off,” Jyn says suddenly into one of their small silences. She jitters her marked leg again, watching him from the corner of her eye. Cassian takes a deep breath and waits patiently, and lets her see him waiting for the explanation she clearly wants to give but is afraid to demand. “They do it on Onderon, sometimes,” she bites the side of her lip, notices what she’s doing and lets go again with a scowl. “When they join the – when they _joined_ the Partisans.”

Cassian clenches his right hand into a fist, relaxes it, clenches it again. The movement pulls at the muscles and skin in his arm, making the desiccated grey words stretch and warp further. “But you didn’t,” he says eventually, allowing her momentary slip of the tongue pass without comment. Their foray on Jedha was at least a week ago and yet Cassian can still recall the arresting power of Saw Gerrera’s stern glare. His stomach still twists when he remembers barreling around the corner of the crumbling catacombs in search of Jyn and seeing the looming figure of an armored warrior lunging at him, staff raised, teeth bared. He remembers all the stories, case files, and hushed whispers about Saw Gerrera and his Partisans. He heard the gruff note in Draven's voice over the comm link when he reported the death of the Lion of Onderon. He saw a daughter's grief in Jyn's face when she reached for the man who raised her, even as he shook his head and told her to save herself.

Cassian only met Saw for a bare few minutes in the middle of a planet’s death throes, and even _he_ can feel the void that the rebel leader left behind in the universe when he died.

“No,” Jyn murmurs. “I didn't.”

Another small silence fills the space between them, but this time Cassian hunts for something to say, because the fine lines of her face are pained, memories turning her eyes distant and curling her fingers into white-knuckled fists on his thin sheets. He can’t seem to find the right place to start, though; nothing comes to mind except trite platitudes or empty condolences. He wants, desperately, to say something that matters, something to let her know that she’s not completely alone in the grief she carries. At the very least, he wants to somehow guide them back to the easy conversation of before (which he realizes with a small jolt must have been going on for…awhile? How long has she been here?) But what can he possibly say? He may understand what it’s like to lose family, but she found her lost father only to lose him again immediately – _twice_. And Cassian was there both times, dragging her away from the bodies.

There are no words he could ever speak that will change her past, or his part in it.

“I never considered burning mine,” Cassian offers at last, because it’s the closest thing to comfort he has to give, this painfully personal confession. “Burn scars are distinct and hard to cover up. Words are…”

“Just words,” she finishes when he trails off.

“Considering it already looks like _this_ ,” he raises his arm slightly, nodding to the thin cracked letters. “There was always a chance it would just fade away on it’s own, anyway.”

The tension lines in her face ease slightly, and for a moment she almost looks amused again. “Kay give you odds on that happening?”

“High,” Cassian tells her dryly, and winks. “Very high.”

Jyn laughs, again the quiet laugh that she bites off immediately. This time, though, she doesn’t glance at the door to check for eavesdroppers. That shouldn’t feel like a small victory to him.

But it does.

“I guess,” she say slowly, studying his bare arm in a way that should be invasive but instead just seems thoughtful, “even in the ugliest moments, even if it was stupid and impossible -” She shakes her head, turns back to her own leg and rotates her ankle thoughtfully as if she can still see the tangled green words under her trouser leg, “even _then,_ some idiot part of me still had…”

“Hope,” Cassian finishes softly, and now they are neither of them looking at one another, but Cassian is so aware of her presence that he can practically feel every centimeter of air between his bare arm and her ribs. He can hear her breathing, slow and calm and just barely audible under his own thudding heartbeat. He turns his bare arm over on his thigh so he can make out the skeletal remains of the word _story_ in old Festi tunnel-slang on the inside of his wrist, his blue vein just barely visible running underneath the letters like water flowing under sheet ice.

“Cassian,” Jyn says, her brow furrowed. It’s the first time she’s spoken his name without blaster bolts screaming through the air around them, without explosions and terror and death all around them. Hells, he thinks a bit hazily, it’s the first time she’s spoken it at all, rather than shouted it across a battle field. “Are you – “

His comm buzzes, the alert startlingly loud. Jyn jumps a little, then immediately scowls and turns away to hide the momentary weakness. Cassian fumbles the comm link out of the pack by his feet and checks the ident screen before clicking it on. Unidentified Caller, the screen reads, which means it’s probably from someone in Intel.

“Captain,” Draven’s voice is made gravelly by the static of the base network. “Council meeting in briefing space Six Eight Osk Five, thirty minutes.”

“Understood, sir,” Cassian replies, and is unsurprised when the line goes dead before he has a chance to say more. The screen on the comm link reverts from the caller ident to the standard chrono, and what he sees _does_ surprise him. He’s been talking to Jyn for nearly _three hours,_ if he’s not mistaken.

Oblivious to his quiet shock, Jyn shifts on the end of the bunk, clearing her throat. “Big talker, your boss.” He can tell that she’s aiming for the same wry tone as before, but there is an edge to her voice that turns the joke brittle. She’s sitting up again, arms crossed over her ribs and fingers wound in the material of her shirt. Not quite as defensive as before, but certainly no longer relaxed.

“Usually he just sends a text message,” Cassian gamely tries to keep things light, but her darkening mood and the heavy weight that has dropped back into his gut make it fall flat between them. “That was practically a speech from him.”

“Right.” Jyn pushes herself up to her feet. “Guess I should head there.”

“There’s time,” Cassian says, but it’s a weak offering and they both know it. Whatever time they had was burned away on Jedha, and Eadu, and possibly even more planets where the Empire tested their precious new toy and then lied to the universe about the results. He sighs, regretting already his poor choice of words, his pathetic attempt to tell a better story than the one they are in.

“Yeah,” she says anyway, granting him the little white lie. “A little.”

She leaves with one last awkward half-smile, something almost like a wave over her shoulder before the door slides shut. Cassian is left sitting on his bunk staring at his bare feet, his bare arm, and wondering what the hells just happened (and somewhere deep in his chest, a quiet voice whispering that he’d like it to happen again, someday).

He shakes his head, rolls down his sleeve and reaches for his boots. He’s out the door only a few minutes after her, already knowing that he has nothing to offer the Council that will possibly motivate them to send a fleet after a science fiction nightmare weapon. He already knows how this story will end. This is, he thinks, possibly the rebellion’s darkest moment, the cruelest test they had yet faced.

He gathers all the facts he has from the last few months of working Operation Fracture, combs his hair and adjusts his rank badge on his uniform jacket. He will give the Council the clearest, most honest report that he can, and then he will watch them deal with the decision before them. He hopes they make the right one.

But not much.

* * *

She showed someone the mark.

She showed the rebel spy the extremely distinguishing and culturally-significant body marking and told him that she couldn’t bring herself to remove it.

She showed Captain Cassian Andor the overgrown, painfully ugly, twisted mark on her skin.

She showed Cassian her soulmark.

Why in the many karking hells did she do that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are two [cheap shots](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Han_Solo) taken at [Han Solo](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kessel_Run) in this chapter, and I don't apologize at all. (I love the guy, I do, but sometimes it's just too easy)
> 
> Cassian's story about the Rodians is a reference to another fic of mine, ["Cold Comfort."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207900/chapters/40463186)
> 
> chapter title from ["Meet Me In The Woods"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBy2qRG1PA0) by Lord Huron (which was playing on a loop in my head when I wrote this, and we were a hair away from "show me yours and I'll show you mine" as the chapter title instead, but that was just a little too on the nose)
> 
> I really wanted to build some kind of bridge between the fight on Eadu and the hangar scene. This is the bulk of it, but there's still a bit to go.


	8. running through life and cruising towards death

The Council listens to his report, but only barely. Cassian keeps his eyes straight ahead and projects his voice to be heard throughout the packed room, but he still sees the fear in the Senators’ eyes, hears the crowd huddled in the back whisper and snarl before he’s even finished.

Across the table, Jyn Erso watches him like he’s the only person in the room, like his words are the only thing keeping her here and not already on a ship bound for Scarif, blaster in one hand and pipe truncheon in the other, ready to burn the world down herself to stop the Empire's newest monster before it consumes them all.

Unbidden, he hears in the back of his mind the soft murmur of a half-forgotten voice, feels the comfortable warmth of a small house full of kind people – _and so, Navaar gave the blade he carved from the mountain’s icy heart to winter’s beloved daughter, and she smiled with sharp teeth as bright as sun on snow, so bright that the heart-eaters cried out in pain and wonder -_

Cassian finishes his report, waits for the Councils’ restless, frightened focus to shift from him to each other, and then he fades deliberately into the background. Wrapped in their fears and disbelief, none of the Senators even notice. Within moments he’s out of the room and striding down the halls towards the barracks. He’s done what he can for the Alliance. He’s given Command all he has hunted and fought and killed for, and he knows that it’s not enough.

But Cassian has been in this rebellion too long to just let it go (who is he kidding? He’s never “just let it go” in his _life_ ); and so he’s got one more desperate thread to pull. Several desperate threads, actually. He strides towards the mess hall where he’s almost sure he’ll find most of them at this time of day. Maybe one or two in the training arenas, possibly Melshi’s still in his bunk but more likely he’s passing out that rot-gut he brews in his quarters over by the armory with what’s left of his ground team.

A few dozen thin threads of hope, small individual stories he’s come in and out of throughout the years. Sefla, Melshi, Kappehl, Timker, Maddel - people he's worked with, people he's helped, even a few that he recruited into the rebellion himself. All with stories like his own: lonely, desperate, full of blank spaces where the records had to be scrubbed. They are the kind of people who are used to being alone, and who are definitely not guaranteed to help him if he asks no matter what kind of shared history between them.

It’s not much, but - 

_(even if it was stupid or impossible or dangerous, I still had)_

\- but if there’s anything Cassian Andor is good at, it’s weaving threads together into a coherent narrative. For once, he’d like to be proud of that.

Cassian’s chest feels curiously light, the anger and helplessness he expected earlier somehow absent. There’s a freedom in his emptiness this time, a sort of liberation in his knowledge that he has a chance to alter the story as he sees fit. He reaches up and pulls at his shirt absently until he notices he’s doing it, notices his fingers rubbing over his collarbone where he can almost feel the faint brush of warm breath against his skin. He can’t feel anything except his fingers of course, and he doesn’t have any good reason to value a brief accidental touch from days ago. He doesn’t have an excuse for the lightness in his body. He doesn’t have anything left to give anyone except one last possible chance to make something terribly wrong in this galaxy _right_ again.

He has nothing left now but hope.

* * *

Cassian says _I believe you_ , and everything changes.

Roughly two dozen rebels gather in the space behind Cassian, some of them standing at stiff attention as if they are prepared for her inspection, others stand with their arms crossed or hands resting on low-slung rifles. She thinks she recognizes one of the latter as the Human rebel who spoke to her on Wobani, the one she kicked in the chest after he unshackled her wrists. He watches her with an impassive expression, although the Human woman behind him glares at Jyn with an irritated sort of respect (it takes her a minute to place that one – shovel to the face on Wobani, she thinks. She probably shouldn’t bring it up in conversation). But all of them - even the one with the fading bruise on her cheek – look fully armed and prepared to march at her order.

 _We’d like to volunteer_ , Cassian tells her, and smiles.

Jyn finds herself smiling back, and she doesn’t even bother to hide it. Let him see. Let him _know_.

 _Welcome home_ , Force help her, when was the last time she even allowed herself to think that word? She's never even let herself speak it out loud, never listened for it from anyone.

But then, she’s never had anyone choose to stay with her when all she has to offer is unavoidable trouble and uncertain hope.

“So,” Bodhi says carefully, afterwards. He shuffles to Jyn’s side and picks at the gloves he must have found while she was talking to Cassian before the Council, watching the various rebels move quietly but with purpose around the hangar. Cassian stands a few meters away, his back turned to them now. Still aware of them, however, aware of _her_ ; she can see it in the way his head turns every now and again to glance back at her, she knows it like she knows her own heartbeat. If she raises her voice even a little and says his name, he will turn back around. He might even walk back over to her.

That thought sends a shiver through her chest that she doesn’t have the slightest idea how to handle, so she sets it aside. For now.

“Um,” Bodhi clears his throat, fidgets a little more. Jyn drags her eyes off the back of Cassian’s neck (is it her imagination, or is he a little bit more red than normal? Are his ears always quite that pink?) and looks at Bodhi. “I was,” he starts, stops.

Jyn waits. She has no idea how to help him deal with…whatever Saw did to him (whatever Saw became, after she lost him), but she can do this at least. She can wait patiently for Bodhi to sort through the jagged edges of his mind and piece together what he wants to say.

“That’s a lot more people than, than, um, we had before,” Bodhi says at last, haltingly.

“’Bout thirty,” she offers after a beat, so the silence won’t feel so awkward.

Bodhi nods gratefully, picks a little harder at his right glove and then moves up to his flight goggles. “Yeah. Yeah. Thirty. Some, um, some Pathfinders, I think. That’s, that’s good, right?”

“They’re all experienced,” Jyn tells him, because that much is clear even without knowing anything about them. Cassian’s brought her roughly a full ground team, although only a handful of them have Pathfinder badges or symbols on their gear. On the far edge of the crowd, Jyn spots a familiar face and nearly jumps in surprise. The Pathfinder guard, Lieutenant Scowler – Koravi, no, _Kovani,_ that was it – has swapped his shock baton and his shackles for a rifle and a battered canteen. He looks up and catches her gaze, and there’s a brief tightening of his lips… but then he nods slowly.

Jyn hesitates, then nods back. She supposes she can’t really blame him for not being friendly when they first met when she wasn’t being particularly charming herself. And it’s probably a good thing that a Pathfinder officer wouldn’t be too excited about someone wearing an Imperial uniform in his home base. She doesn’t have to like the man, but, well…he’s apparently volunteered for a suicide mission based purely on the hope that he can do something about the Death Star. Maybe it’s time to let some of her resentment go.

Weirdly, her leg itches for a moment, but it stops before she can rub it against her other shin. The Pathfinder turns away, and Jyn finds herself looking back at Cassian, who is now in quiet discussion with a short, scruffy Human with dark hair and a tired smile. They appear to merely be chatting about the weather, gesturing to the nearby open hangar door, but Jyn knows they are probably discussing the supply crates stacked just to the side of the hangar door, plotting how they will discreetly extract a few of the marked explosive crates without anyone else noticing and stopping them.

When was the last time her leg itched like that? It must have been…the last time she was on Yavin IV? Or no, was it Jedha, when she met Chirrut and he told her something about kyber stars and what his own mark meant? Shit, speak of _resentment_ \- she’d been so angry then, so certain that Chirrut and Baze (and everyone in the galaxy, really) was out to get her. So certain that the universe had nothing for her but pain and loneliness and her eventual bitter death. And now, it was starting to seem like maybe…

Anyway. Chirrut had said something about her mark on Jedha, hadn’t he? Something about her rejecting it or leaving it incomplete, she can’t really recall that part, her memories fuzzy with the carnage that followed soon after. Chirrut had asked her personal questions about her mark, though, that she remembers perfectly. She’d been so _angry_.

“He’s going to get in, um, in trouble, isn’t he?” Bodhi asks softly, snapping Jyn back to the present.

“Chirrut?” She glances back at the crates where the Guardians still sit, Chirrut speaking with his hands fluttering gracefully through the air, Baze silent and still as he glowers out at the bustling hangar. “Why?”

“No, I mean, I meant – “ Bodhi laughs, and for a brief moment he doesn’t look fractured at all. “Cassian. I meant Cassian.”

Jyn blinks. Oh. “Why?” she asks again, watching one of the scruffy Humans in her new ground team nod to Cassian and walk casually towards the far side of the hangar door, not precisely towards the explosive crates but definitely in that general direction.

“Well, he’s, um,” Bodhi’s fidget returns in full force, the fingers of his left hand pulling and twisting at the material of the gloves over his right hand knuckles. He looks around as if checking for eavesdroppers in such a painfully obvious manner that Jyn grimaces. She wipes the expression off her face as fast as she can, though – it’s not his fault he was raised like a person and not a weapon. “He’s going against his, his orders. Right? Insub-“ Bodhi swallows, his face turning a degree paler, and Jyn wonders just how deep Imperial conditioning is for cargo pilots. “Insubordination.”

She nods. “Yeah.”

( _I had orders! Orders that I disobeyed!_ )

(How bad of a person does it make her, to wonder if Cassian’s actions now have anything to do with what she said to him on Eadu, with his weakness that she slammed her fist directly into when they argued? How damaged of a person does it make her, if she’s a little bit glad that he ripped into her own old wounds so accurately, so that she doesn’t have to feel too guilty for hurting him?)

“Should we,” Bodhi hesitates, but Jyn waits, her face as empty of judgment as she can make it. “Should we, you know, um, talk him out of it? Tell him to, to stay and, um, let him,” Bodhi sighs, presses his lips together, and makes a visible effort to slow down his stammering tongue and speak clearly. “Let him live.”

And Jyn…thinks about it.

Would these soldiers – _spies, saboteurs, assassins_ – would they come with her if Cassian didn’t? It’s possible. He made it pretty clear that they were all volunteering for _her_ mission. She had told the Council that the Death Star could be stopped, and these people chose to believe her. None of them are here because Cassian ordered them to come. None of them are sneaking supplies and quietly slicing through the hangar locks on the stolen Imperial shuttle because they are obligated to do so by rank or oath. They are here because she’s offering a chance to do something important, a chance to save the world from unequivocal evil, and they choose to take it.

So perhaps she could do it, make an effort to keep Cassian Andor alive without giving up her chance to finish her parents’ fight. If she tells Cassian that the Alliance needs him to deal with the Death Star plans once she returns them, if she tells him that he can do more good here than with her…

( _I couldn’t face myself if I gave up now, he said, and his voice didn’t break but Jyn could hear the cracks in it anyway, the hollow desperation left by years of failure against the ever-growing Empire.)_

No. She can’t protect him from this. It would be wrong of her to even try, even though she –

It hits Jyn like a blow to the chest, her lungs constricting and her breath catching. She can’t protect him from this, _even though she wants to._

She wants to protect Cassian from the Death Star. From the Empire. From the kinds of horrible nightmarish monsters that her father birthed into the universe, whether he liked it or not. She wants it so badly that her heart aches with it, her ribs constricting, her skin burning. It’s been…Force help her, it’s been years since she felt something like this, not since her parents, not since Saw, this desperate terrible need to put herself between him and anything that tries to hurt him.

But she won’t. Not like this. Not if it means taking away his own choice to face the darkness and burn it back. The only thing she can do is face it with him.

Cassian finishes typing something in to his datapad and looks back over his shoulder at her again, his eyes catching hers for a moment before he turns back to the hangar, back to his preparation, back to their mission. But that brief moment feels like a whole conversation, like a physical touch between them, like his hand on her arm as he pulls her away, or her face pressed against his throat as she throws her body over his to shield him. For that one moment, Jyn knows without hesitation that she is not alone.

Then he turns back to his work, and Jyn can think around the euphoria again.

She sighs, and nudges Bodhi’s tense elbow with her own. “We all make our choices,” she tells him, pointedly not thinking about the irony of her words. “This one’s his.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi picks at his sleeve again, then gives her a lopsided little smile that makes her want to brush back his hair, or maybe punch him in the shoulder (in a friendly way). “Guess that’s, um, that’s true.”

Jyn does punch him in the shoulder, smirks at his startled laugh, and then strides across the short distance between her and Cassian. Cassian doesn’t say anything when she comes to a halt at his side and crosses her arms, eyeing the hangar activity with studied indifference. But she sees his shoulders roll a little more back, his chin set at an angle much like her own, his sharp eyes sweeping from the surprisingly distant hangar guards to the slow but deliberate movements of their squad. They stay like that for awhile, standing quietly, both of them steady and watchful and waiting.

* * *

“Are you really pulling out the hyperspace limiter?”

Cassian jumps as her voice breaks the humming quiet of the engine access closet. He spins around to face her, and curses when his shoulder catches on one of the jutting valves sticking out from the bulkhead. In the doorway, Jyn raises her eyebrows and tilts her head, watching him regain his balance with an embarrassed cough.

“If we have to leave Scarif in a hurry,” he starts to explain, but the smirk on her face stops him. “Kay told you,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“He told Bodhi,” Jyn corrects, leaning against the door frame between the lower cargo hold and the cramped space that allowed a careful engineer to access the stolen Imperial shuttle’s main power, propulsion, and life support systems. Cassian’s no engineer, but he’s learned a trick or two in his career as both a pilot and a spy. “And Bodhi wasn’t very happy about it,” Jyn goes on, crossing her arms and regarding him coolly. Over her shoulder, ten or eleven of the rebels who came along on this last chance mission sit in various poses around the lower cargo hold, cleaning weapons, checking armor, performing whatever little private rituals kept them going in the face of almost certain death. He thinks the big sergeant in the corner might even be napping. Jyn ignores them, but he can see her shoulders tense when one of them coughs and shifts his weight – she doesn’t like having her back to so many strangers. She keeps her eyes on him, though, and her pose stubbornly casual.

Cassian shrugs and jerks his head in casual invitation for her to squeeze into the space with him and put her back to the bulkhead instead of the open door. “It would be against Imperial regulations to tamper with ship systems,” he says in his most neutral tone, hoping that will end the questioning.

Jyn rolls her eyes and pushes up from the doorway, although she doesn’t step closer. He can’t blame her – there’s barely enough space for one fully grown Human, let alone two. “Pretty sure it pisses off more than the Imps,” she replies dryly, not falling for his bantha-shit for a moment.

Cassian sighs, and turns back to the open access panel behind him. The shuttle’s hyperspace limiter is roughly the size of his fist and buried in the ship wiring just barely within his reach through this panel. In most spaceships, the limiter prevents the ship from jumping into hyperspace while inside a planetary gravity well – the sort of thing that made insurance companies and pilots on safe routes feel much more secure. But this shuttle isn’t running with a standard supply convoy along guarded trade routes, and it’s sure as hell not beholden to any insurance company. It’s headed directly into enemy territory with the intent to cause trouble. If push comes to shove, Cassian wants the option to jump out of Scarif even if he has to take them through the planetary shield to do it (he hopes not, the damage that could cause will likely be non-survivable anyway, but still, if it comes down to that or definite capture…)

“It’s not really so dangerous,” he says into the wiring as he leans into the open panel space and digs through the connectors he’s already untangled. “You have to do a few extra calculations before you throw the throttle in, but there’s no reason not to jump from atmosphere if you’re not worried about drawing attention.” He feels the last connector to the hyperspace limiter finally click open under his questing fingertips, and with no small sense of satisfaction he slides his fingernails into the small slots that will let him yank the damn thing free.

“Or getting thrown into a planet core,” Jyn says from roughly five centimeters behind him, and Cassian jumps again, this time banging his head against the edge of the open panel. “You okay?” Jyn asks as he straightens, rubbing his head ruefully. She’s moved from the door after all, but instead of turning to lean up against the inside of the door when it slid closed, she is now leaning against the bulkhead next to him, so close that her shoulder almost touches his chest when he turns to look at her.

“Fine, I’m fine,” he manages, struggling to keep his voice even. From the way Jyn’s smirk deepens as she watches him scrub at his scalp, he’s not doing a great job of it. The room suddenly feels much, much smaller than it did when he first pushed his way into it and started pulling the panels open, and he’s not sure it has anything to do with the fact that the door is now closed. There isn’t really anywhere to go in this closet space, but the line of Jyn’s shoulders still looks tight, so Cassian shuffles back the handful of centimeters available until his back is pressed to the bulkhead opposite of her. The hyperspace limiter is still in his hand, which he’s curled up against his chest reflexively in his surprise. He hastily loosens his grip on it and drops his arm so that he no longer looks like a child clutching a beloved toy.

Jyn looks from the ugly metal ball in his hand to his face. “You pulled the U-Wing limiter out, too, didn’t you?”

Cassian debates his answer for a moment, well aware that removing a hyperspace limiter makes him seem fairly reckless and maybe even a bit arrogant. Why did Kay tell her about his habit of adjusting ships to his own personal specs? That didn’t seem particularly – ah, no, Jedha. She saw him jump out of atmo on Jedha. She must have put the pieces together on her own.

“Yes,” he admits at last, and tosses the limiter to the floor. There isn’t anywhere to store it in here, and frankly, he doesn’t see the point of packaging it up for sale on the black market like he normally would. They have roughly twenty more hours until they reach Scarif, and Cassian has neither the will nor the capacity to consider the plot beyond that. He’ll write it when he gets there, or someone else will, perhaps.

“How have you never ended up flying through a star?” Her voice is incredulous, but Jyn’s shoulders are slowly relaxing down, the fine lines around her eyes easing, so Cassian takes the question as more conversational than confrontational.

“I just run a few extra calculations,” he repeats. “It doesn’t take that long.” She raises her eyebrows again, and he shakes his head. “It really doesn’t. Less time than it takes to get clear of gravity wells or manipulators, anyway.”

“ _Manip_ \- you’ve jumped away from another ship’s _gravity manipulator?_ ” Now her eyebrows are almost lost under the locks of hair that fall across her forehead, but the tension has almost vanished from her body language.

“Once.” Cassian decides to push his luck just a little more, and cautiously sits down on the deck with his back to the bulkhead. It takes a moment to get comfortable among the grid panels and jutting pipes, but at last he finds a good spot and crooks his knees up in front of him, propping his forearms on them and nodding to the small space next to him. This time, Jyn doesn’t hesitate, stepping over his feet and turning to slip down beside him on the deck. Cassian allows himself the small, warm thrill that runs through his chest, but he clenches his fingers into loose fists to keep himself from reaching up and rubbing at the strange flush along his collarbone. “I had a contact who worked for the Hutts,” he starts, watching her wrap her arms around her knees as she settles, her shoulder just barely brushing his. “I had to meet with her while she was in transit with a Hutt convoy through the Arkanis sector. Getting close enough for her coded transmission was easy,” he grimaces a touch more theatrically then he really needs to (and is gratified by the way her grin widens in response), “just pretended to be a merchant hoping to offer the convoy some wares. Getting away again, however…”

Jyn snorts. “How close where you to their ships when you jumped?”

“The main ship had me in a tractor beam, about halfway into their hangar,” he admits, and tries valiantly to keep any bragging out of his tone as her eyes go wide. “So, pretty close.”

Jyn stares at him for a moment, and Cassian bites the inside of his cheek subtly to keep his face completely blank. And then she laughs, a short burst of sound that makes the warmth in his chest spread with embarrassing speed through the rest of him. “Kay called _me_ reckless,” she mutters, and Cassian finally allows himself to smile.

“He never said I _wasn’t._ ”

“True,” Jyn shoves a lock of hair out of her face and behind her ear, presumably to see him better, and Cassian’s fingers itch to reach out and –

The shuttle jolts a little underneath them, standard hyperspace turbulence, but it’s enough to remind Cassian of where they are, and more importantly, why. So he keeps his hands to himself and just…watches.

She sees him doing it, she _must_ see, she’s far too sharp not to look at him and know all the stupid, lonely, fragile little hopes that keep flitting through his head even as they race at top speed towards their probable death and the possible end of the free galaxy.

But she doesn’t seem to mind, and sometimes, like now, he thinks he sees her looking back. He thinks he sees her gaze flick to his mouth, his hands, and then back to his eyes and for just a moment he is almost sure that the same little sparks are crackling through her veins, the same wild and unformed images of what a future might be…

She must know what he’s thinking when he looks at her, but she hasn’t stopped him from looking yet.

“That’s a good story,” she says into the little silence they’ve fallen into. “Worth at least a meal or two with the Partisans.”

He blinks, because this is the first time she’s offered information on the Partisans that wasn’t immediately relevant to their survival or the mission. “Oh?” he says at last, not sure how to ask for more without turning it into an interrogation.

“Onderon,” she clarifies, picking her words with as much care as a bomb technician picks her tools. “When I was with S- with the Partisans. We had a lot of Bivall join us when I was…twelve, I think. You know any Bivall?”

Cassian hunts through his memory, but he can’t recall every specifically working with one of the humanoid Bivall people. “Homeworld is called Protobranch,” he says, digging up what little he knows of the species. “Amphibious evolution, bacta producing planet, large family groups, mostly Imperial aligned.”

Her flat look cuts off his recitation, and Cassian catches himself running his tongue over dry lips in an old nervous tic that he thought he had grown out of.

“So, no,” Jyn surmises, and he shrugs awkwardly against the bulkhead.

“Never worked with any. There aren’t many of them in the Alliance.”

“Imperial aligned,” she repeats, and it’s only when he hears the contrast does Cassian realize how bitterly he had spoken the words. “They have a whole culture around stories,” Jyn goes on, turning to study her gloved hands. “Telling one was almost a kind of currency. So when we picked up a big group of them, it sort of spread through the cell.” She looks up and catches his eye again, her wary expression relaxing into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was certainly softer. Warmer.

Cassian spread his fingers against his knees and refused to reach across.

“So you could trade a story,” he says, encouragingly, “for food?”

“Or a blade sharpener, or a pair of new socks,” now there is a definite lift to the corner of her lips, a smile that somehow seems both nostalgic and also a private joke, shared just between them, “a new blaster, if it was a good one.”

Cassian glances down at her hip before he can stop himself, and sure enough, there is his blaster tucked into the holster at her side. It’s not a particularly distinctive model, but he’d modified the scope on it months ago and yes, even from this angle he can see his own handiwork along the curve of her thigh. It shouldn’t make him feel flushed and giddy like some kind of adolescent with a crush. It's ridiculous. And yet.

When he looks back up, Jyn’s watching him from the corner of her eye, and that smile, that little private smile hovering on the corner of her mouth has grown into something that makes his chest ache.

Cassian takes a deep breath, and then unsnaps his spare ammo pack from his belt. Slowly, as if he’s afraid to make any sudden movements and scare her off (maybe he is, but he’ll never, ever admit it), he holds it up between them. It’s the same kind of ammo pack his blaster uses (hers now, he’d never dream of trying to reclaim it from her, not when she is about to run into the arms of the Empire and will need every weapon she can get her hands on), and she registers it immediately.

“So,” Cassian says (and he recalls with sudden, perfect clarity the feel of her breath on his skin in Jedha, her fist pulling his collar askew and her mouth practically pressed to his throat in that brief moment when she pinned him down to save him in the middle of a firefight), “tell me a story.”

Jyn sits up, dropping her arms from around her legs to rest on her thighs, and looks at him for a long moment.

Cassian summons up every ounce of self control he has ever possessed, and waits, his offering held between them in his hand.

She reaches up, and takes it.

* * *

The Battle of Scarif is a horrific disaster, a triumphant victory, and after the Death Star arrives, an unmarked grave. In orbit, the battle fractures and ships flee, dragging the fight out to other systems, disrupting other lives, jump-starting other stories.

On the surface of Scarif, there is no way to run and nowhere to go, so thousands die on the shining beaches.

Jyn Erso is among them.

Almost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from [Way Out There](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtmbXANVRhc). 
> 
> The [Bivall](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bivall) are a race from Legends, and while it's not explicitly stated that they are Imperial aligned after the Republic falls, it seems pretty likely that the Empire would work hard to keep a Core world that produced large amounts of precious bacta under control. Bivall are also listed as 'immigrated species' on Onderon, so I figure there had to be at least a few who rebelled against the Empire on Saw's home planet. That they use stories as currency and that a group of them joined Saw's personal Partisan cell on Onderon are just my own headcanons.
> 
>  _Sefla, Melshi, Kappehl, Timker, Maddel_ \- these names refer to canon characters who went with the Rogue One team to Scarif: 
> 
> **\- Sergeant Ruescott Melshi,** the SpecForces Infiltrator that lead the team on Wobani to extract Jyn and who led the ground team on Scarif (died just outside the doors of the Scarif tower while covering Chirrut's walk of faith down the beach).  
>  **\- LT Taidu Sefla,** who technically outranked everyone on the shuttle except Cassian, but deliberately passed authority over to Melshi and gave Jyn a field promotion to sergeant so that she could officially issue orders (he likely did this because a sergeant giving orders on a battle field is obeyed unless directly countered by a superior in the chain of command, because sergeants are always experienced and highly trained individuals, because it's one of the highest ranks a non-officer can achieve. Sefla died with Melshi at the doors of the Scarif tower, covering Baze Malbus' roaring rampage down the beach)  
>  **\- Private Farsin Kappehl,** forward observer, recon specialist, sniper, who spent most of his time behind enemy lines and according to the visual guide was almost never on the front lines (died on the beach, firing up at AT-ATs)  
>  **\- Corporal Walea Timker,** combat engineer who in canon shows up with the rebel reinforcements delivered by Blue Squadron. in this story, however, I chose to bring her with Rogue One, because seriously there were not enough women in this movie. (Died in the light of the Death Star)  
>  **\- Corporal Rodma Maddel,** an advance scout for Alliance urban combat units, whom the visual guide specifically states was personally recruited into the rebellion by Cassian Andor. In canon, she joins the reinforcements with Blue Squadron when she learns that Cassian Andor was on the ground in Scarif, but again, I'm putting her on the ship with Rogue One from the start. Some might recognize her from my other AU, "you give me something" as one of the recruits that Cassian and Jyn bring through the invasion of Jedha. (Cause of death unknown, but confirmed).
> 
> All of these are canon characters that you see in the movie, all of these notes are canon except where stated, and as a note, I'd like to say once again for the record that when Gareth Edwards kills off all his characters, he kills _all of them_. Shite.
> 
> (Yes, I skimmed past the _welcome home_ line, because while I think it's important, I wanted to sort of anchor on that other line that gets passed over a lot but always hits me like a truck - _I believe you_.)


	9. turn and face the strange

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got away from me a bit. So. Now it's 10 chapters!

Blood in her mouth.

Eyes ache. Closed. But aching.

Hands cold. Face cold.

Blood in her mouth.

Muffled sounds, voices? Voices. Beeping. Rhythmic beeping. Machines. Medical machines. Click of boots on hard floor. Head ache.

Something light weighing her body down from throat to ankles. Pain radiating from her eyes through her head. Blood in her mouth.

Sterile smell. Medical smell. Hospital or medic station. Her hands and face are cold, the recycled air twining down her neck and into her collar, humming of machines in her ear, that’s strange, last she knew her neck was warm and all she could hear was the ragged, tired sound of his breath in her ear as they waited for -

_Cassian!_

Jyn wakes up.

The thing weighing her down turns out to be a blanket of some kind, though she doesn’t understand that until she’s finally kicked her way free of it. The muffled sounds resolve into two rapid voices half-shouting over one another – _hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re safe now Sarge, hold still, let me just, ah!, oh shit you okay Barry, yeah I’m good she’s just got a hell of a right hook, maybe get the sedatives again, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s **okay!**_

Cassian is on the bed next to her.

Jyn wakes up for real.

Scarif, the tower, the man in white, the message, Cassian, blood, pain, sand, light blooming over the horizon, shadow, the shadow of a shuttle, blood, pain, light streaking in lines down the viewscreen of the shuttle, Cassian in her arms, people shouting, a medic pushing her aside and leaning over Cassian, and then -

A distressed Nautolan in a wrinkled medic’s smock stands next to Jyn now, her hands upraised in a peace gesture, her green skin tinted grey with exhaustion and stress. “ – thing is okay. Please, Sergeant, I promise the battle is over if you would just – “

“Scarif,” Jyn demands, or tries to demand, her throat grating painfully around the word and turning her voice into a gravelly parody of itself. Jyn coughs so hard that she staggers, falling sideways into the empty bed. _Her_ empty bed. She’s in a medical ward somewhere, tangled blanket around her legs, loose unfamiliar clothes on her aching body, the lingering sensation of sedatives weighing down her veins. Her head aches, a peculiar sort of pain centered around her eyes. Jyn snaps up a hand to ward off the medic before the stranger grabs her arm. “Scarif,” she tries again, and this time the word comes out clear enough to understand.

“Yes, Scarif,” the medic nods, still moving cautiously towards Jyn, clearly determined to get her back in the abandoned bed. “It’s over, Sarge.”

“You’re on Yavin,” another voice from her left, a Human in a medical smock just as rumpled as the other. A large bruise is blossoming on his cheek, and he watches Jyn with even greater wariness. “Alliance Medical Ward. No one’s threatening you.”

“Please, Sarge,” the Nautolan soothes. “It’s over. The battle’s over. Please sit down and let us check your vitals, okay? We’re just trying to help.”

Over her shoulder, Cassian’s face is pale and still, his hair slicked back against his head and making his sharp features look even more drawn than when he’s awake. But Jyn can see his chest rising and falling. The glowing screen positioned just over his left shoulder shows a steady heartbeat, smoothly working organs, and a graphic that she vaguely recognizes as a Bacta Resonance Imager that flashes _treatment effective [97%]_ at the bottom.

Jyn allows the Nautolan to help her sit back on the bed, only because the alternative would be allowing her knees to buckle and crashing back instead. The Human medic smiles thinly and hands the Nautolan a medical kit, then rushes off to deal with someone calling for a nurse outside of the curtain hanging around Jyn and Cassian’s space. Jyn half expects him to glare at her as he goes, the bruise on his cheek turning more vivid purple by the moment, but all he offers is a half-glazed expression of exhausted concern before the curtain swishes shut, blocking her view of another row of medical bunks and rushing medics in a large white room beyond.

“The transmission,” Jyn asks as the medic opens the kit and plucks out some incomprehensible silvery tool. “That we sent. From Scarif.”

“I don’t know anything about your mission, Sergeant, I’m sorry. They don’t tell Medical about battle strategies. We’ve just been dealing with the returning crews.” The medic sighs and shakes her head, her green lekku swinging against her shoulders. Her clan tattoos swirl in pink patterns across her skin, hidden partially by the sterile headscarf that she’s wrapped around them. Jyn keeps staring at the swirls, her mind fracturing and flitting in a thousand directions as the medic pokes and prods at her with the silver tool. “Your partner will be okay,” the medic says abruptly. She jerks her chin over her shoulder at Cassian’s still form, and if she notices Jyn’s shoulders dropping with relief, she is kind enough (or tired enough) not to mention it. “He’s been in bacta twice already. Two surgeries on his spine and one for his ruptured spleen. But his charts are promising and the bacta seems to be reacting quickly. So we think he’ll be fine.” She holds up the little silver tool in front of Jyn’s face and waves it slowly in front of her eyes. “He asked us to tell you that, when we brought you out from sedation.”

Jyn stalls, torn between thanking the woman and trying to hide the complicated cascade of emotions this information sets off in her chest. But the medic turns back to her kit before Jyn can decide what to do, sterilizing the little silver tool with the stiff, rote movements of someone who has done this exact thing a hundred times in the last hour alone, closing the kit with a hard snap.

“Lots of wounded,” Jyn says instead, slowly. She tries to make the sympathy in her voice obvious. She isn’t sure that she manages it. She blames her headache, and the whole of her life experience.

“Not as many as we’d hoped,” the medic replies, eyes slipping closed for a moment. Then she sighs and straightens. “But enough to keep us busy. Please stay in your bunk, Sergeant. Your eyes are still recovering. I will notify your superiors, and someone will come to fill you in on the situation soon, I’m sure.”

And then she’s gone out into the large medical ward beyond the curtained space, and Jyn glimpses her pausing to rub at her face before the curtain swings shut again. A distant shout, the kind of controlled panic of one medic calling to another for immediate assistance, and the Twi'lek medic’s footsteps rush away, leaving Jyn alone in the muffled quiet. Jyn swallows, rubs at her ear as if she can push away the strange hushed sounds of a medical ward that she can’t see. Her fingers feel greasy and smell like something sharp and sterile – medical grade bacta, she must have been treated or even doused with the stuff herself. She rubs at her ear again, then her hair, and grimaces as she finds it sticky with what she hopes is also bacta residue, or at least something other than her own dried blood and sweat. She needs a shower. Maybe there will be an actual water shower in her near future, but she’ll settle for a sonic. And some practical clothes.

Cassian’s screen beeps rhythmically, his breath barely audible in the hushed silence of their little space. Jyn shifts on the bed, picking at the thin cotton medical scrubs she’s wearing. Clearly the Alliance struggled to find something that fit her, possibly because they had too many patients to accommodate. The shirt is far too large, the trousers too short, pulling up to reveal her bony ankles and bare shins. Across from her, Cassian has no shirt at all, his chest covered almost entirely by pale bandages. _Surgeries_ , the medic had said. _Bacta treatments._ He’d fallen so far down that tower, and he’d been so still at the bottom, how had he even survived that? How had he made it back up to her side at the top? Jyn’s mind somehow felt like it was flying at hyperspeed along a thousand different routes. Why are they curtained off together, did the medic call her “sergeant” because Cassian told them about Lieutenant Sefla giving her a field promotion, is Lieutenant Sefla alive, are any of them alive, did the plans make it through, did the Alliance destroy the Death Star, did they stop the Empire, was any of it worth the –

Her leg is bare.

Fucking hells, _her leg is bare_.

Her ribs scream in protest and sharp pains like dagger strikes bite into her knee as she pulls it up to the edge of the bed and claws at her too-short trousers, but Jyn ignores the pain as she yanks the material up to reveal as much of her leg as she can.

Her leg is _bare._ It’s wildly disorienting, this leg that has no mark of any kind on it. Oh, it’s still recognizable as _her_ leg, there’s that scar just under her knee from when she was ten, there’s the triangle of freckles on the top of her foot, and the pallor of skin that never sees sunlight if she can help it is familiar enough. But on her shin, where all her life there has been a winding mass of green words climbing like vines around her ankle and up her calf, where in the last few years has grown a thicket of vicious thorns clinging to the inside of her skin…

Nothing.

 _We all make our choices_ , Jyn thinks a touch hysterically, and wonders if she should do…something. Laugh. Cry? Call the medic back? The woman had said something about Jyn’s eyes recovering, was this a side effect or -

She takes a deep breath. Another.

Another deep breath, except this one isn’t hers, it’s coming from across the room, it’s coming from –

Cassian.

He’s awake, or at least, his eyes are open. He’s staring at her, his expression a little dazed but more open than she’s seen it since…well, more open than she’s ever seen it. Jyn’s leg thumps as she lets it slide back to the floor, wincing as her knee twinges in protest.

Cassian doesn’t look down at her newly-bare leg, doesn’t seem to even register the incredible change - and, well, why would he? He’d seen her soulmark once, only once, and it may have been significant to Jyn but for all she knows he’s already forgotten.

Jyn catches the bitter flavor of that thought and feels vaguely ashamed of it, especially when Cassian’s mouth curls into a soft smile. He’s drugged, she thinks a little drunkenly. He probably doesn’t even know where he is, or who she is, let alone what marks are on (or _not_ on) her skin.

He murmurs something then, and Jyn worries for a moment that her brain has been scrambled, but no, it’s just something in another language, something she doesn’t recognize but figures is probably his native tongue. She tries to pick out the words, but then Cassian frowns, shifting under his blanket. His screen beeps faster, a warning, and Jyn shoves herself up from the bed again and stumbles across the short distance between them, hands outstretched to stop him before he hurts himself.

But all he does is pull one arm free from under the bed, his right arm, wrapped in as many bandages as the rest of his upper body, and catches her hand in his own. His fingers weave through hers before she even knows what he’s doing.

Jyn stops, staring down at his hand. He says… _something_ again, that same something in a language she doesn’t recognize. She can hear the wonder in it, slurred under all the drugs, and he’s looking at her like he can’t believe she’s here. Like he’s happy she’s here, too happy to even bother hiding it. It’s such a terrifyingly honest expression. It makes something in her want to be honest too. She glances up at the curtain, but it stays firmly closed. There is no one here but Cassian. It makes Jyn feel braver than she has in years.

Jyn braces her free hand on the edge of Cassian’s bed and leans down towards him, a little embarrassed at the pulse of nerves that races through her. It hurts to lean down like this, her knee protesting and the ribs on her left side burning, but it’s a negligible protest, a clean burn. She shakes her head and tries not to feel like she’s about to give up her most precious secret, like she’s exposing her soulmark for the world to see.

Except she isn’t, because she doesn’t have it anymore, does she? Somehow, she’s scraped herself clean of the mark, of the past that warped it and the future that demanded it, and she’s not sure how she’s supposed to feel about that but…but…

Jyn closes her eyes and whispers into Cassian’s ear, and lets her lips brush his cheek as she pulls away so that he understands what she means.

Cassian smiles at her again, looking as astonished and giddy as she feels, and then his eyes slip closed and he’s gone again, drifting back into bacta-laced dreams. His hand, however, is still wrapped around hers and she can’t think of a good enough reason to dislodge it. So Jyn perches on the edge of his bed and watches his breathing for a while. Her hair and face reeks of bacta, her head aches, and her skin still feels the scrape and scratch of Scarif’s sands. She needs a shower and food and to find what remains of her crew. She doesn’t know where they might be, if they made it, nor does she know what happened with the plans, the Death Star, the war. She decides that she will face those things soon enough.

But for now…

She wonders what Cassian said, thinks about what she told him, and her heart pounds so hard against her chest that she keeps lifting her free hand to press against her ribs, as if she can push her unruly heart back into place inside her. It’s not a bad feeling, though, this honesty, this sense of having given more than she ever imagined she could. If anything, it feels a little like she’s gotten away with something, spoken truth and escaped unscathed.

Jyn sits on the edge of Cassian’s bed and holds his hand, and lets the world outside the curtains pass her by. Just for now.

(Almost three days later, Jyn finally gets that shower, not just a quick walk through a sonic but a real water shower that requires her to strip down entirely. By then, she’s learned of Bodhi Rook’s new synthetic arm, Chirrut’s hover chair, Baze’s scarred back. By then she’s heard the frankly insane tale of a mourning Alderaanian princess and a young Tattooine Jedi. By then she’s seen the explosive death of her father’s horrific weapon in the sky over the Alliance headquarters. By then she’s even accepted a quiet commendation and a formal commission into the Alliance as an officer in Rebel Intelligence. Three days after she wakes up from Scarif, so many extraordinary things have happened in Jyn Erso’s life that she’s almost surprised that she’s still capable of _being_ surprised when she finally bothers to look at her naked body and learns the consequences of her spoken truth.)

* * *

Cassian sits on his bunk, so absorbed in the gleaming black cube in his hand that for a moment he doesn’t register the faint scratching sound of someone popping the cover off his door lock. The quiet but distinctive sound of live wires crossing snaps him back to reality in a hurry, however, and he drags the blaster from under his mattress up to bear just as the door whines open to reveal the invader.

“Hey,” Jyn looks at the blaster and then at his face with an unsurprised but wary expression.

Cassian sets the weapon hastily on the bunk next to him, leaving it in her line of sight but pulling his hand away. “Good morning,” he clears his throat, hunting for a way to invite her inside that won’t sound either overly formal or unpleasantly suggestive. Before he can settle on anything, Jyn strides into his small quarters and slaps the door lock to close it. The old metal prefab door grinds shut, and Cassian winces at the sound. He should have oiled that when he was first discharged from medical and set up in this room. Little late now, though, given the impending evacuation of Yavin IV.

“Crap security around here,” Jyn says as soon as the door claps shut with a final squeak.

Cassian laughs, though he cuts it short when the movement sends a sharp spike of pain through his patched-together torso. “They use the older tech in the barracks. The good security locks are reserved for the Command centers and around the communication servers.”

Jyn nods. “Make sense. Nerve centers. Still,” she shrugs, folds her arms. “You ought to have better.”

There’s something in the way she says that, the way she skims her eyes dispassionately around his small temporary space in order to avoid looking at him. Her pose is casual, leaning back against the wall across from his bunk with one boot propped up against the baseboard behind her. But if he looks carefully he can see the fine tension in her shoulders, the way her right hand is curled just a little too tight against her ribs on her left side. Cassian is tempted to pursue it, to ask if she had a greater injury on her side than he was told, or perhaps to find out what she meant by “better.”

He doesn’t, though, not yet. That tension could mean any number of things, her careful avoidance of his eye could be a tell or a hide, and he won’t allow himself to place too much meaning in her apparent disregard for his security coupled with her strange insistence on it. He won’t read too much into the memory of her arms around him in the elevator of Scarif, or of her strength holding him upright, holding him together as he waited to die. It feels a bit like leaving a story half-finished, but he isn’t ready yet to face what that story’s end might look like, not if it cuts off as abruptly or as coldly as so many other tales he’s told. He’s not ready to turn that last page. Not yet. Soon, perhaps, if she gives him any clearer signs, if she leaves or if she _stays_. But not yet.

With some difficulty, Cassian pulls himself back from the painful brilliance of his last moments on Scarif to the comforting shadows of his small, dim room on Yavin IV. He catches Jyn looking at the black cube in his hand and holds it up so she can see it clearer.

“Droid core,” she says promptly, as if he’s asked a question.

Cassian nods. “K2SO,” he starts, and then has to stop and clear his throat against the tightness.

Jyn drops her folded arms and crosses the few steps between them, dropping to a crouch in front of him. “Can you…” she frowns, gaze flicking from the core to his face and back again before he can parse her expression properly. She gestures at the core, then spreads her hands out questioningly. Cassian notes with a start that she’s taken her gloves off, something he has never seen her do outside of the medical ward, where she had no choice. The scars on her knuckles flex and pull as she moves her fingers, and Cassian has to curl both his hands around the droid core to suppress the urge to reach over and trace them.

“I can rig up a simple interface and power source if I find a few spare parts. And I can...I can fully restart him, probably. Assuming I can find a compatible KX body,” Cassian twists the core around slowly, running his thumb briefly over a familiar scrape on one side, cataloguing the slight crack in one of the connector ports. “And even then, there’s a good chance he will be…not exactly the same. Lost or damaged memories. Personality subroutines he didn’t have time or space to upload into this back up. Not to mention I have no idea how this core might interact with any trace programming left behind by the droid I would have to kill to restore Kay.”

Cassian closes his eyes, because there is the worst of it. Unless he somehow managed to get ahold of a completely new, not-yet-programmed KX processor (and given that the model is now over a decade old and only built in one factory in the entire galaxy, the odds are low), then the only way to restore K2SO would be overwriting whatever droid inhabited the body first. KX models are not typically given much in the way of personality programming, with tiny vocabulary indexes and extremely limited decision matrices…but Kay had developed into a full person from that narrow start. Cassian would have no way of knowing what he was destroying if he overwrote another droid. A poor sequel for Kay, to be rewritten on the bones of some other slaughtered being. Cassian doesn’t think he can do it. The only option he can stomach is a new KX processor, a clean slate. If he could ever _find_ one.

“Vulpter,” Jyn cuts into his thoughts abruptly, and Cassian blinks at how quickly she’s cut to the heart of his fragile hope. Vulpter, the planet where Arakyd Industries produces the vast majority of it’s Imperial-aligned droids. Where the only confirmed KX factory exists.

“It’s in the Deep Core,” he replies, shaking his head. “Even if I had a reason to go that far inward, I’d never manage a new – “

“Never,” Jyn interrupts, one eyebrow lifting, “is a big word.”

It brings him up short, the soft tone only thinly masking the solid steel of her conviction. For a moment, the impossibility of getting a new KX dwindles to little more than an inconvenience, and the idea that he will get his friend back seems more a certainty than a lost cause. After all, what were the odds they would even make it to the Scarif Archives, let alone find the exact file they needed? That they would find the means to transmit that file to the Alliance? That they would do any of this in time for it to even matter? That their story would turn out to be anything more than a morality tale cautioning others to avoid reckless action?

What are the odds that Cassian would be sitting here now, with Jyn at his knees and the slim chance to restore his friend in his hands?

Cassian made a point of not asking Kay for those odds before they departed for Scarif. Now he thinks perhaps he will, later, if he gets the chance. Kay would have loved – no, Kay _will_ love the chance to expound on the improbability of Cassian’s life.

“Medics said twelve days,” Jyn pulls Cassian’s attention back from the cube, and though she hasn’t moved away from her spot in front of him, Cassian can hear the sudden reservation in her voice. She isn’t quite looking at his face again, scanning restlessly around the room as if checking for traps or listening devices. It takes him a moment to understand, until he sees her eyes pause on the bandages visible under his sleeve cuffs before she looks away again.

Right. It’s been two weeks, and he is finally authorized to pull the many post-surgical bandages off his arms and chest. The surgeon in charge of his case had requested that he schedule an appointment in Med Bay Five to have them removed by a medic. But then she had sighed, rubbed the fine whiskers on her chin, and added _but when you take them off yourself anyway, please take care not to pull at the surgical patches underneath. If you bleed at all, come back to medical. I’m serious, Captain._

Cassian sets Kay’s back-up core on the small fold-out desk next to the end of the bunk and leverages himself to his feet. Jyn rises without pushing up with her hands, as graceful as a dancer as she slides back out of his way. Cassian considers hiding how impressed he is by that, and then decides not to bother, smiling at her as he steps around and heads for the little sink in the corner. The faint blush on her otherwise unmoved face is worth it.

As he pulls down the small bacta patches and the handful of sanitizing wipes that he scrounged from an old med kit specifically for this moment, he hears Jyn snort behind him. “You’re not going to medical, are you?”

Cassian shakes his head and turns, holding up the wipes and patches. “No need,” he starts to shrug, then thinks better of it. He doesn’t want to put too much strain on his newly-healed skin right before he has to strain and twist to peel it free of bandages. “I’m prepared to handle any small leaks.”

“ _Leaks_ ,” Jyn repeats incredulously.

“You might want to…” Cassian gestures at the door. “This probably won’t be that pretty.”

“You can’t reach your back,” Jyn folds her arms again, and this time her right hand is definitely gripping her shirt too tight against her left side. Jyn had authorized him to read her personnel files as soon as she signed on to Rebel Intelligence, and in turn he had quietly added her as a medical point of contact to his own profile. It seemed…right. Now Cassian runs through what he knows of her medical treatments since they returned from Scarif. Extensive treatments for burned retinas and optic nerve damage, all successful. Multiple hairline fractures on her left shin, stabilized. Torn rotator cuff on her right arm, showing signs of full recovery but still requiring physical therapy for some weeks to come. He can’t recall any mention of broken ribs or cuts along her left side.

He’s considering asking about it anyway, since they have moved onto the subject of injuries, but Jyn gets ahead of him. “You’ll tear the surgical patches off when you reach back.” She jerks her chin at the supplies in his hand. “And you know it.”

Cassian sighs, because she’s right. He will likely pull the fragile surgical patches loose as he twists and stretches to get the bandages fully free from his skin. If he’s being honest, he’s not really looking forward to bleeding all over himself, but he knows it will be minimal enough. Otherwise the medics wouldn’t have discharged him at all, Draven’s urgent call for his functional agents be damned. “The medics are still swamped,” he says at length; he knows he seems like a stubborn fool to insist on this himself when it’s not the best way to heal. But he’s also not wrong; Medical is overwhelmed, both from the Battle of Scarif and the follow-on Battle of Yavin. Not to mention the sudden influx of refugees from Alderaan, who may not necessarily be injured but still often need attention from the few doctors and therapists that the Alliance has recruited. (Cassian makes a mental note: speak to Draven about recruiting more medical specialists. He’s almost sure that’s on the list of priorities anyway, but he should offer his services as soon as possible in that direction).

Jyn nods. “I know,” she says quietly, and suddenly Cassian realizes that she probably came here specifically for this purpose. He assumed she was simply passing through to say hello, something she’s been doing at random intervals since she was released from Medical herself. It felt odd, but good, like working in a new character to a narrative he’s been telling for a long, long time. Her visits up to now have always been brief, a touch awkward, and completely vital additions to Cassian’s day, but this time…

Carefully, in case he’s wrong, Cassian holds up his little hoard of emergency supplies and tilts his head towards the bunk. “Would you…” he pauses, uncertain, but the look in Jyn’s eyes is encouraging so he forces himself to complete the question. “Would you mind?”

She grins at him, a quicksilver smile that appears and vanishes as fast as a lightening strike. Cassian’s breath catches in his chest before the faint twinge of pain reminds him to let it out again.

“Shirt,” Jyn orders, uncrossing her arms and bracing her stance, as if she’s preparing to fight his bandages to the death, if necessary. A pause, and then Jyn bites her lip, her no-nonsense air faltering for a moment. “D'you need,” she flaps a hand a bit randomly, “help?”

Cassian clears his throat and orders his ears not to turn red. He hopes his hair is long enough to hide that they do anyway. “No, I’ve been sticking to, ah,” he gestures at the buttons that go all the way down the front of his shirt. Full button or zip shirts are less common in the Outer or Mid Rim territories where he mostly works, so he only has a few of them. But he can’t get a pullover on and off without straining something lately, so he’s been washing and wearing the same three shirts since his medical discharge. One of the buttons on this shirt is already coming loose from overuse. It will be relief when he can get back to a wardrobe better designed for his work. It will be a relief to regain the ability to lift his arms over his head without feeling like his skin is shredding across his torso.

In retrospect, he probably can’t get the bandages off his upper arms without tearing something, either. It’s a good thing Jyn came along after all, though he can’t for the life of him think of a good way to say that out loud. He distracts himself by focusing on the loose button, mentally cataloguing his wardrobe and how he will pack it for the evacuation (he can give some of it to the quartermasters, no need to haul around the various undercover outfits he won’t need for awhile) – really, anything that keeps his mind off of the fact that he is slowly and cautiously undressing while Jyn stands just out of arm’s reach.

“Arms first?” Jyn’s voice sounds a little odd, but Cassian decides that for once, he won’t overanalyze it. She doesn’t sound unhappy, or in pain, and that’s good enough for now. He’s not going to look for anything more than that. Not yet.

“Good idea, I think,” he replies, sitting gingerly on the bunk edge again and raising his arms awkwardly in front of him. Even with his shirt off, he’s still almost entirely covered by the bandages, but the humid recycled air from the Temple’s atmospheric controls still feels a little cool on his newly exposed skin. He shivers, then regrets it when the muscles in his sides protest painfully. The bandages are some new kind of self-clinging anti-bacterial type that someone stole off an Imperial medical research facility. Even two weeks after his last surgery, they still smell strongly of bacta and something he can’t quite identify but puts him in mind of sour fruit. It’s meant to be particularly good at healing large areas of damage in a single body, and thus requires the patient to be practically swaddled in the stuff. He’s not entirely sure where the end of the wrapping is tucked, nor how to peel it loose.

From the narrow-eyed glare Jyn is giving the light-blue wrappings, Cassian judges that Jyn doesn’t know where the bandages begin either. “Knife?” he asks after an awkward moment of both of them staring at his wrists.

“Knife,” she agrees grimly. With alarming speed, a small switchblade appears in her hand, and Cassian has to bite back a laugh at the intensity with which she stares at his left wrist. He worries it might come out sounding more hysterical than amused. “Hold still,” she commands, and then with a practiced move, slips the point of the blade under the top layer of the bandage on his left arm and flicks it. The bandage parts with a soft tearing sound, then Cassian moves to grab the frayed edge before it can reseal itself to his arm. He winds it away, stopping to hand Jyn to end when he gets to his elbow and the movement requires him to stretch his side more than is comfortable. She has to cut the bandages against twice more, because apparently the medics wrapped him in more than one roll (a _lot_ more, damn, he might have had more injuries than they even told him). The awkwardness falls abruptly into a kind of comfortable rhythm, the strips of sticky bandage piling up on the creaky old chair next to the fold out desk, and Jyn’s breathing a soft counterpoint to his own as she tugs and winds the stuff from his skin. When his left arm is clear at last (still slightly tacky and smelling of bacta and fruit), Jyn stands and moves to his other side without comment. Cassian wonders if she can see the little thrill that easy, unspoken movement feels to him. He wonders if she knows how good this feels, to let her do this for him without it feeling terrifying or exposing.

She did take a commission with Intel. Draven has spoken of her to Cassian as if they are already partners, as if her staying with him is a foregone conclusion. Cassian isn’t nearly so sure, but perhaps, if he _asks_ –

Jyn’s fingertips drag up along his right forearm, leaving trails of warmth where the cool air assaults his bare arm.

No, not now. Later. Soon. For now, he contents himself with relinquishing the wrapping ends and letting Jyn continue unraveling his bandages up to his right shoulder. For now, Cassian focuses on the thin white lines left behind by shrapnel on his forearm, so small that the medics assure him they will vanish all together, gone beneath the cracked grey markings of his soulmark.

Or they would, if his soulmark was still there.

Cassian’s heart twists in his chest, the pleasant nervous warmth of Jyn’s presence fades, and he feels a faint surge of nausea. As nonchalantly as he can manage, he tilts his wrist back and forth. No matter which way he turns, however, his skin is bare of even the shriveled grey marks that had a few weeks ago remained of his soulmark. His soulmate has died, then, perhaps. Or maybe he has finally done something to sever the link so completely that even the Force has given up on him.

“Okay,” Jyn says near his ear. “This next. Tell me if it pulls on your hair or anything.”

He nods, no idea what she’s talking about and not too concerned either way. The quiet _snickt_ of her switchblade snapping back open barely registers, though there is a tiny part of him that notes his lack of concern with interest. The rest of him is absorbed in the faint scars on his forearm; his mind keeps trying to see the familiar grey pattern in the thin random shrapnel cuts. He’s not sure if he feels relief or despair, and the uncertainty is as troubling as the implications of a lost soulmark. His soulmate must have died, whoever they were; he’s never heard of a mark vanishing unless that happened. Then again, he’s never heard of a mark drying up or warping the way his did for years – except for Bodhi’s bleeding letters. Chirrut’s strange shadowed characters. Jyn’s overgrown thicket of unreadable words.

Jyn. She’s the only living person who has seen his mark since he was a child. He can ask – he shouldn’t ask – but if she knows anything, if she even guesses, perhaps –

“I thought spies didn’t get tattoos,” Jyn murmurs from his side, and Cassian blinks at her because… _what?_

Can she _see_ his mark? Can she see any difference in it? But as he jerks his head up to stare at her, Cassian discovers that Jyn is not looking at his arm at all, but rather at his chest. She’s peeled away most of the bandages from his chest without him even noticing, absorbed as he was in the absence of grey on his arm. And now she is peering curiously at his upper chest, one of her hands pressed against his back as if to steady him, the other reaching up to brush a fingertip against his collarbone.

Then she stills. No, that seems too gentle a description; Jyn turns to a living statue in a breath, her eyes wide, her face pale. Cassian looks down, and though he can feel her finger vividly against his skin, he can’t see it. He shoves himself up to his feet and walks back across the tiny room to the sink, and the small mirror nailed over it.

There are words on his collarbone. Cassian’s addled brain takes a moment to process what he’s seeing, but it’s undeniable. Written in small, neat dark green letters just along his collarbone on the right side of his chest are three words. It’s in Basic, he realizes, squinting as he mentally flips the letters in the mirror.

 _You came back_.

He turns back to Jyn, bewildered, and sees her sitting on his bed with her hands in her lap, staring at him with a pale face and wary eyes. It makes him think of the first time they met, her fierce walled off expression looking up at him as he loomed over her. The memory sits poorly in his mind, raw and shameful despite himself. So when he walks over to her this time, he immediately sits next to her and holds out his hand. She takes it, slowly, unclenching her fists from her thighs as she does.

They sit in silence for a moment, hands gripping tight as if they have just been given terrible news, or perhaps they are waiting for the news yet, like they did in the Medical Bay while the remains of the Fleet took to the skies over Yavin IV to face the Death Star. He had held her hand then, too.

Cassian wishes he knew what to say. He has no idea what this means, or why it’s happened. He can’t seem to muster up any theories, either, which is somehow the scariest part of it. He is adrift in a world he’s never really bothered to understand, certain that it held only pain for him.

It’s Jyn who anchors him again, her hand warm and tight around his. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, lets it out slowly. Takes another. Lets it out. Cassian finds himself breathing with her, slow and steady, one breath after another. After awhile, his heart slows again, the tension in his body relaxes marginally. As if she feels it (perhaps she does, his hand flexing in hers), Jyn opens her eyes. She reaches up carefully and brushes her fingertip over the words once more, like she can’t quite believe they are real. Under her touch, Cassian’s body sparks like she’s setting off tiny catalysts under his skin.

“Jyn,” he says, as her finger traces gently along the slant of letters he can’t begin to explain. “Jyn.”

Her lips tighten, something that might be pain, might be fear passes across her features.

“Jyn,” he calls again, tugging on her hand until she comes back from wherever she’s gone inside her head and looks up at him. “Are you okay? What is it? Do you…do you recognize the words?”

He’s not sure why he even asks, the words flying out of his mouth before he can think them through, but he knows in an instant it was the wrong thing to say. Her mouth thins even further, her hand pulling free of his. “You don’t remember,” she says in a strangled tone, and something small and wild in Cassian’s heart wants to scramble for her hand again, wants to reach out and push away whatever is turning her voice so small and brittle.

But he doesn’t. Not yet, not if she isn’t going to stay, not if there’s something so broken in him that even the Force can’t figure out what to do with him. All he can offer her is a weak, “What is it?”

Abruptly she stands up. “I’ll see you around,” she says vaguely. “Don’t pull the surgical patches off.”

And then she’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Vulpter](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Vulpter) is in fact the planet deep within the Core where Arakyd Industries built the KX droids. The wookieepedia page specifically mentions K2SO as having been constructed on that planet, which I thought was interesting. Guess they don't have many satellite factories? Anyway, existential and moral quandaries concerning droid souls aside, this was meant to be a bit more light hearted than last chapter. Oops.
> 
> What Jyn discovered when she showered - and what she knows about Cassian's new look - are upcoming soon. I honestly meant to put it all in a single chapter, but then this first part turned out to be nearly 7000 words long and I figured I should probably stop there. So, more to come. In the meantime, many of you will probably guess where I'm going with this. I've still got one more reveal though!


	10. what remains of us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I know I said that this would be the last chapter, and that I've been calling each chapter the "last chapter" for like three chapters, but indulge me. I keep writing roughly 5k per scene, and I figure more than that might get tedious. 
> 
> So, once more, here's the penultimate chapter. The last one will be soon. Thank you for your patience.

The evacuation of Yavin IV is a hectic, rushed affair. The multiple miscommunications, ridiculous number of unintentionally redundant checklists and authorities that still somehow almost leave behind several loads of valuable weapons and fuel, and the general confusion and harassed irritation of all those involved in the planning and leadership of the event reveal more to Jyn about the Alliance than is comfortable. It’s still a bigger operation than she was really expecting, bigger than the Partisans even at their peak. But not _much_ bigger, and Jyn finds that a bit more distressing than she wants to admit. Somehow, she’s always imagined that the Alliance - with their grand political declarations to the Senate, their “legal rebellion” distinctions, their own damn internal _government system_ _complete with tax laws_ – would somehow be _more_. More stable, more funded, more smoothly integrated with it’s own pieces.

In retrospect, maybe that Council meeting before Scarif really should have clued her in to the tenuous state of the Alliance a lot sooner than this.

So they aren’t ready to stand toe to toe with the Empire again, not for a long time. Well, alright, fine, but the truth is that if Jyn wants to finally stop running and fight the good fight, there’s no better game in town than the Alliance. And her dissatisfaction doesn’t help pack out the base any faster. So she keeps her mouth shut, offers her hands and her time where she can, and tries not to think too hard about the vast difference in resources and organization between the Empire and the Alliance.

She tries not to think about a lot of things, actually. In a way, the demanding chaos of the evacuation from Yavin IV to (what’s left of) the rebel fleet is a blessing. It gives her nearly three days of being too focused on her work to think beyond it, and too tired during her rest cycle to do much more than curl into a ball in some quiet corner and drift through dreams too vague and confused to be frightening. Too busy to examine her body – or her thoughts – any more.

On the fourth day, Jyn’s number finally comes up and she’s assigned a spot on Home One, the Mon Cala cruiser that’s been designated the new flagship for the Alliance. The All Hands notice that pops into her unclassified personal account says that the Alliance will remain “mobile for the present, allowing unique flexibility in our response to the adversity and an opportunity to strengthen our security while exploring our options.” Jyn interprets this as “we’re homeless and on the run,” which is oddly comforting, in a way. She’s been both of those things for a long time; the difference is the continuous use of “ _our._ ” Whatever happens now, wherever she goes, the people she’s found go with her.

She confirms this for a fact before she accepts the reassignment aboard the cruiser. Bodhi sends her a quick message over the comm links promising to meet her in the mech bay on Home One’s lower decks where he will be working while his prosthetic arm finishes grafting properly to his body. Baze merely shrugs at her over his repeater cannon when she finds him in the armory, shoving a datapad across the table to show her an official letter of designation from Mon Mothma herself, inviting Masters Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus to join Alliance Command’s diplomatic corps and assigning him to her personal entourage on the cruiser.

Kay answers her brief text to his cobbled-together, rudimentary comm link with an even briefer response: _of course we are_.

She doesn’t ask Cassian.

She doesn't need to, right? Kay answered for them both. Anyway, it’s not that she’s hiding from him. The evacuation is chaotic and busy, and she’s tired. She’s busy and tired. Focused.

An hour after Jyn disembarks from her shuttle onto Home One, she finds her way through the narrow passageways and ridiculous number of decks to the mess hall nearest her assigned bunk, and catches sight of a familiar silhouette across the long tables. As if he senses her looking, Cassian turns his head and looks straight at her, eyes catching across the crowd of tired, hungry rebels shuffling through the hall with trays of cheap, unidentifiable food.

Jyn feels her body tense up, her ribs aching as she holds her breath. She hasn’t spoken to him since she helped him pull off his bandages, hasn’t even seen him since he stared at her blankly, confused by the words he didn’t recognize scratched into his skin. She waits for him to frown or glare or shake his head at her. She waits for him to stalk over and demand to know what’s wrong with her, or worse, why she’s been so blatantly avoiding him after explicitly agreeing to be his partner.

Cassian smiles at her.

It’s a tiny thing, barely more than a lift of the corner of his mouth, there and gone almost before she’s registered it. As it fades, she notices suddenly the dark circles under his eyes, pronounced even from this distance across the crowded room. He stands as tall and self-possessed as ever, no signs of any limp or hunch of pain. But there’s an exhausted set to his shoulders that she hasn’t seen since…Eadu, or just after Eadu, maybe.

And then he turns around and walks away, out of the door at the far end of the mess hall and vanishing down the white corridor beyond.

“Hey,” someone says in a deep voice too gruff to be Human, “you’re blocking the door. You going in or out? Gotta pick one.”

Jyn blinks, spins on her heel, and shoves her way past the big Shistavanen back out into the corridors of Home One. Cassian smile haunts her all the way through the twisting, confusing series of narrow halls and ladderwells, emergency hatches and random work spaces she passes. She expected anger. Confusion. Disappointment. Hells, she’d been prepared at the very least for the same _contempt_ he’d swept over her on Eadu. Anything, really, except whatever _that_ had been. Resignation? Understanding?

Forgiveness?

Well, what does he have to forgive her for, anyway? She hasn’t done anything wrong. In fact, she’s been working her ass off these last few days to help out his Alliance, hasn’t she? Making sure what remains of _his_ hope pulls itself together and stands strong against _his_ feared and hated enemy? (That the Alliance is her own last remaining hope, that her fear and hatred of the Empire rivals Cassian’s, is irrelevant to the point.)

Jyn reaches the bland grey door that leads to her tiny but private compartment in the officer’s decks. It’s a huge luxury to have her own room, but she understands that all Intelligence field agents rate one. She’s sure there’s something dark (and necessary) in keeping certain people isolated from the rest of the rebellion, but she hasn’t bothered to examine it against the prospect of having somewhere she can actually sleep without snapping into high alert every time someone shifts their weight. Her berth is really more like a supply closet, so narrow that she can touch both walls at the same time and only just long enough for a thin bunk and a footlocker. The ceiling is low enough that she only needs to jump up a short way to touch it. If she were claustrophobic it would be a nightmare. But it’s located in a relatively quiet part of the ship, and it’s _hers._

The urge to duck inside and curl up on her bunk for awhile where no one can see her or judge her is strong, yet Jyn finds herself hesitating in the doorway.

 _(Your home is gone,_ says the big man in the scary armor as he drapes a thick, rough cloak over her shaking wet shoulders _, there is no place there for you to go. Lah’mu is the past, and you must look now to the future.)_

Jyn curls her fingers along the open doorframe, feels the cold metal bite into her exposed fingertips. The rivets along the frame press into her gloved palms. The little room in front of her is empty save for the bed and the locker, nothing inside that could trace back to her specifically, no windows or portals or screens anyone could peer through to see her. A year ago she would have fought tooth and nail for a space like this, a place where she could sleep safely but also still abandon without a second thought should the need to run arise. It’s less comforting now, somehow.

 _(He said I could get right by myself,_ Bodhi whispers hoarsely, huddled in the corner of the U-Wing. _If I followed my heart, I could make it right.)_

Down the hall, she can hear the muffled noise of people passing up and down the ladderwells and access lifts, bustling as they try to settle the remains of the Alliance into this new shape. She’s been a part of that effort for a few days, but it still feels very detached from her, like she’s only just started to carve out a shallow little space for herself, a space as empty and easily left as this room.

 _(My love for her has never faded,_ her father bows his head, holographic eyes unseeing as Jyn falls to her knees and gasps, shaking with the impact.)

She shouldn’t want a space here, shouldn’t want to fit herself into the small gaps that Bodhi and Chirrut and…and _Cassian_ have made for her. She knows where that leads, she’s lived it for years. She’s known since she was eight years old what it could feel like to have that space suddenly snap shut around her, throwing her out into the emptiness again. She’s avoided this exact scenario for so damn long that deliberately stepping into it now seems not only dangerous, but utterly ridiculous. What is she thinking? Why is she still here? She can fight the Empire the way she has been for years, drifting nameless and unattached out through the vast world, striking when she can and moving on before they even notice. She’s good at it. She’s good at being alone. Doing anything else is just…it’s…

 _(You will carry them all your life,_ Mama sighs as she looks at Jyn’s soulwords, and it turns out she’s wrong but somehow she’s also right, because the vines on Jyn’s leg have withered and died but Jyn knows they will echo in her soul as long as she lives.)

 _We all make our choices_. No one’s ever said those words to Jyn Erso, but she’s heard them every day since she was born, all the same.

(Cassian’s voice is low, but it carries over the sounds of the busy hangar as clear as the crystal around her neck, _welcome home.)_

Jyn glances around her small room one more time, decides that she’s still probably grateful for it anyway, and then turns sharply back into the hall, letting the door slide shut behind her.

She finds Chirrut after roughly an hour of increasingly exasperated searching. She finally tracks him to what looks like an auditorium of some kind, a circular space in the middle surrounded by large white steps serving as seats. The far bulkhead from the door is mostly a wide circular viewport that currently looks out at Yavin’s yellow bulk. Chirrut sits serenely in the very middle of the circular platform, hands on his knees, staff laid out on the deck next to him. He’s facing the viewport, although Jyn figures that’s probably more coincidence than design. As she treads lightly down the steps towards him, she catches a flash of light out in the black space around the gas giant, and then another. A third. She squints over Chirrut’s head, trying to figure out what the random flashes of varying shades of light might be. Another flash, odd, they don’t seem to be happening at regular intervals, nor are they the same brightness or size. What could -

“Pieces of the Death Star,” Chirrut comments casually in front of her, otherwise unmoving. “Burning as they enter the planet’s atmosphere.”

One of these days, Jyn tells herself as she scowls at the back of his head, she’s going to ask him how he does that.

Before she can decide if it’s worth it today, however, Chirrut pats the deck next to him companionably.

Jyn sits, at first crossing her legs and sitting straight as he does, but the cold metal deck is too uncomfortable. So with a grunt, she folds her legs up and props her elbows on her knees.

Outside, the Death Star continues to die, piece by piece by silent piece. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised that it’s still happening, even weeks later. There had been a lot of debris; it would take a long time for all of it to be pulled into whatever gravity well could catch it. Some of it would likely drift out into the void forever, never rotting or corroding in the emptiness, a memorial to both the evil that conceived of it and the courage that killed it.

And, she supposes, the desperation that built it.

Next to her, Chirrut breathes in, a long, soft sound. Then out. Then in, and Jyn finds herself counting, _in_ , two, three, four, her chest filling and expanding in time, and _out,_ two, three, four, and _in_ …

She clears her throat, shakes her head. From the corner of her eye, she catches a fleeting grin flicker across Chirrut’s serene face, but it’s gone when she turns to glare at him. It occurs to her that there’s probably a reason Baze constantly looks like a nettled bear.

“On Jedha,” she says abruptly, shattering the peaceful silence. Chirrut doesn’t flinch. “You said something.” She stops, hunts through her memory for the specific words, and finds a frustrating gap. The conversation with Chirrut has been largely overwritten by the firefight that broke out shortly afterwards, by her own anger and confusion.

“I often did,” Chirrut agrees, his face still turned towards the viewport. He is definitely grinning now.

Jyn rolls her eyes. “I meant about my, my soulmark,” she stumbles over the phrase, her tongue rebelling at speaking the word out loud even though she knows that it logically cannot hurt her. It’s gone, right? And anyway, there is only Chirrut in here.

“Ah,” Chirrut dips his head as if he is studying the deckplating, then lifts it back towards the viewport. Another brief flash of light, a big one, another chunk of the Death Star succumbing to the crushing embrace of the gas giant. “So I did.”

“You said…” Jyn snorts, irritated at herself. “Something about a line.”

“Stretched thin, and yet ungrasped,” Chirrut hasn’t moved, and his face is still calm and unruffled, but Jyn gets the distinct impression that he is laughing, somehow.

“It’s gone,” she says flatly.

He taps a finger once, thoughtful, against his knee. “Is it?”

Jyn bites her lip, and says nothing. The silence fills the room again, underlain with the distant hum of the air circulator and the steady tides of Chirrut’s breathing. _In_ , two, three, four, _out,_ two, three, four.

“What happens,” Jyn says quietly, “when a soulmark fades?”

“Usually,” Chirrut replies, as if this is a completely normal and unremarkable conversation, as if her heart isn’t hanging on every word, “it means that your partner has returned to the Force.”

Jyn wrinkles her nose, because that feels both wrong and right at the same time, a correct answer but not the one she’s really looking for. “Usually?” She ventures at last.

Chirrut tilts his head, his mouth pressing down at the corners, and suddenly he looks older. Her father’s age, or more. Strange - logically she’s known that he and Baze were older but until this moment she hasn’t thought at all about how _much_. “Usually,” he says after a long pause.

She probably shouldn’t, but Jyn plunges on anyways. “But not _always?_ ”

The weary lines in Chirrut’s face ease, the subtle play of humor returning to the corners of his eyes and mouth. “The Force, Jyn Erso,” he says with mock gravity, placing his hands together in front of him as if in reverent prayer, “flows through us all. But even the mightiest river may be turned to a new path, if one has the will.”

Jyn chews on that one for a moment, determined to figure it out. She’s the daughter of Galen and Lyra Erso, brilliant scientists in their field, and the prodigy of Saw Gerrera, master tactician. She’s not about to be thrown by a few riddles, not now that she has the time to think about them.

Next to her, Chirrut holds his hands together as if he has no intention or need of dropping them, and breathes. _In_ , two, three, four, _out_ , two, three, four.

Jyn makes it another three cycles of breath before she sighs and drops her head to her raised knees. “What does that _mean?_ ”

“Consider this,” Chirrut settles his hands lightly on his knees as if on cue, “The soulmarks are written within us by the hand of the Force, but the Force is not a sovereign setting out decrees for the kingdom. It is the kingdom itself, both the body and the soul of it, and all who dwell within.”

Jyn turns her head so that her temple rests on her knee and glares at him. “Should have asked Baze,” she says pointedly.

Chirrut laughs. A scattering of lights flash outside the viewport, like a shower of stars dancing into Yavin’s embrace before vanishing from view. “I should have known that metaphor would mean little to you, little rebel sister,” he shakes his head and resettles into his meditative pose. “Perhaps this, then. The Force is not a commander snapping orders to drive his warriors through the battle, determined to reach some grand objective. The Force,” he lifts one hand and holds it out towards her, and Jyn sits up and takes it in her own. His hand is as warm as it had been after Eadu, a steady point to balance against as she struggled to understand. “The Force _is_ the battlefield, Jyn,” he squeezes her fingers gently, pressing against the thick leather of her new gloves. “And it is the battle, it is the soldiers, it is the peace waiting to be new-born.”

For a moment it almost makes sense – a battle, she thinks, and considers how she’s heard people say things like “the battle went well” or “the battle determined the outcome” as if the battle _itself_ had made some kind of choice, as if the battle as an entity had decided who deserved to win or lose, live or die. And that was both true, and not true, because a battle _could_ determine the course of a planet, of a war, of a single person’s life. But a battle was a thousand things all at once, a million different moving parts and thoughts and choices and possibilities all clashing into one insanely complex moment…

“But,” she starts, stops.

Chirrut hums, tilts his head encouragingly.

No, no, she’s lost it. It was almost there, she could almost grasp the edges of it, but now it’s slipped away. She pulls her hand back and crosses her arms on her knees, frustrated. “What’s that got to do with soulmarks?” She asks at last, feeling grouchy and ill-used.

Chirrut lets his now-empty hand float down to the staff on the deck between them, and pulls it up to rest one end against his shoulder. The other end taps lightly against the metal deckplates, once, twice. “The Guardians were disbanded many years ago,” he says a touch wistfully. “A year before I would have been old enough to qualify as an instructor to acolytes.”

“It’s not your fault,” Jyn shrugs, feeling a little guilty at implying that his teaching is substandard.

They let the silence fill the room again, and this time Jyn doesn’t fight the steady pull of Chirrut’s breathing. In, two, three, four, out, two, three, four. She lets her shoulders relax, lets the tension drop from her jaw and forehead. Her thoughts still careen restlessly, but it’s quiet and it’s safe and there is no one to see her picking at the worn cloth of her trouser leg, no one to see her rub a hand across her aching ribs or stretch out her still-stiff knee. In, two, three, four, out, two, three, four.

“Did you ever consider,” Jyn bites her lip, startled at the audacity of her sudden question. Chirrut hums encouragingly again, however, so she dares to finish it. “Leaving Baze?”

She expects him to laugh, or shake his head, or maybe even to crack some rude joke that would put her firmly in her place. She almost gets up and walks out of the room before he can react, because honestly, what kind of a personal question was _that,_ Jyn?

“No,” Chirrut says quietly, because of course he does, “but he once left me.”

Jyn sits upright, shock stilling her tongue.

The end of Chirrut’s staff moves from his shoulder to tap gently against the side of his neck, where the thick black characters of Jedhan stand out stark against his skin. Jyn’s eye, however, is drawn to the faint red marks just behind and to the side of the black letters, a faded shadow of the same words. She had taken that for some kind of artistic effect, akin to the winding vine-shape of the words that once curled up her shin. Now, she wonders.

“Baze Malbus was once the most devoted Guardian of us all,” Chirrut intones, his voice dipping into the rhythm and cadence of a story told around the fire. “A great warrior of disciplined mind and noble heart. Many were the young acolytes directed to emulate Master Malbus, many were the trainees sent to test themselves against his strong arm and quick feet. A paragon of the Temple of Kyber, and a fierce believer in the Force that connects all things.”

He pauses, a small expectant silence. “Until,” Jyn prompts, because she hasn’t heard a fireside legend in a long time, but she thinks she remembers how it goes.

“Until,” Chirrut bows his head, his sightless eyes focused on a distant horizon she cannot see. “His faith was tested. An invading army arrived in the Holy City, first as a peaceful emissary of their far-away lord. Then, increasingly, through false equivalency and cruelty disguised as reason, they began to chip away at the foundations of our home, our city, our faith.”

Chirrut’s voice stays steady and rhythmic, but Jyn can hear the undercurrents flowing beneath the smooth tone. She can close her eyes and _see_ it, the colorful painted city, glittering with kyber in the desert sun high on it’s rocky perch, slowly crumbling away one Imperial Proclamation at a time.

“At first, Baze stood strong against the anger, against the indignity, against the pain,” Chirrut continues. “The walls closed in around us, the faithful scattered and fled, the beauties of the Holy City profaned and destroyed, yet he kept his head high and sang the songs of the Force. But you must understand, these tests of faith did not cease that first day, nor the first month, nor the first year. On and on they went, until every day narrowed and sharpened to a razor wire between right and wrong, want and _need_.”

Jyn’s heart clenches in her chest – she knows that feeling. She knows this story. She’s lived it, in a way. “But he stood strong,” she prompts again, because it feels like the right place to say it, the right way to show that she understands.

“Until he didn’t,” Chirrut nods. “The day he told me he could no longer stay, I…” He pauses again, but this doesn’t feel like the cadence of the story, so Jyn holds her tongue and waits.

The silence sits heavily in the room this time, and after awhile Jyn turns back to the viewport and watches for more flashes of distant light around the curve of the planet.

“After he was gone,” Chirrut says at last, calm again, but no longer as serene, “his words began to…fade.” This time he uses his fingers to tap at the mark on his neck, his fingertips pressing precisely against the red characters marching up his throat. “I did not know, at first, nor did I want to know. It was not until I left the Temple, when I was first living on the streets and grasping for anything that would remind me of the life I had once lived, that I finally asked someone about the mark.”

It’s probably not part of the story cadence, but Jyn can’t resist the urge to lean closer and press her shoulder to his. She remembers what it was like adjusting to life on the harsh uncaring streets of an Imperial occupied planet, to go from respected member of a group to cast-off vagabond. Chirrut lifts his hand from his staff and gropes for a moment until his hand finds her knee, patting it gently. “The person I asked simply said, ‘what mark?’”

Jyn startles at this, sitting upright and peering over at his neck again as if to check. “But it’s still there.”

“Yes, so I’ve been since told,” Chirrut pats her knee one more time then returns his grip to his staff. “Did you know Ishi Tib have difficulty seeing the color red?” He smiles as he says it, and Jyn snorts because yeah, she learned that the hard way once, too. Though she imagines her lesson probably didn’t hit _quite_ so hard.

“So the mark faded,” Jyn says, wrapping her arms around her torso and hugging tightly. “But it didn’t go away entirely.”

“No.”

“Because he wasn’t dead,” Jyn frowns, trying to see how this relates to her own…situation. It does, she can feel it, she just doesn’t see the connection yet.

Chirrut raps his staff against the metal deckplates, a single decisive knock that rings out in the large, quiet room. “His life had nothing to do with it,” he says, “Nor his death, little sister.”

She waits a moment longer, but he lapses into another one of those waiting silences, and she realizes that he has walked her as far as he intends and now it’s her turn to take the last few steps.

“The mark faded, but didn’t leave,” Jyn repeats slowly.

Chirrut’s staff taps gently, approval or simply acknowledgement, but he does not speak.

“And not because he was dead. Or alive,” she adds hastily when the next tap is a little sharper than the last. “But it did fade. And later, the black letters appeared?”

Chirrut says nothing, even his staff stilled now against the deck, but after a moment she realizes that her breathing is subconsciously syncing back up with his, in, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, and that faint sense of amused serenity has returned to his face.

Jyn knows that he’s given her all the pieces, or at least she hopes he has, but she’s just not sure how to put them all together. What happens to someone when a soulmark fades? Why does it fade? Because they die, or so she’s always been told. But Chirrut’s mark faded, and Baze was very much alive. He was just…gone. Left. He left Chirrut, left the Temple, the Guardians, all of it, and for Chirrut that must have felt like…like…

Like sitting in a dark bunker with a blaster and a knife, realizing that someone you loved was never coming back. Like learning for the first time that although your father promised to hide with you, he chose at the last minute to walk into the arms of the Empire instead.

But then Baze came back, at some point he must have come back. And that must have been like…like Saw grasping her arm and calling her his child with a smile on his battered face. Like hearing _my love for her has never faded_.

Like turning around and seeing Cassian Andor standing in front of a group of rebels, ready to face down the galaxy for no reason other than _I believe you_.

“They faded because you gave up on him,” she says quietly. “He rejected you, so you rejected him, too.”

Chirrut bows his head.

“But not all the way,” Jyn continues, looking at the faint red marks. “No matter how ugly or painful it got, some part of you still believed he’d come back. Some part of you still…”

“Loved him,” Chirrut finishes when she trails off.

“And then he came back,” Jyn digs her fingers into her sides and hugs herself tightly, feeling her way through this strange new landscape as she stumbles forward. “He came back and…and…you forgave him?”

Chirrut hums and taps his staff once more, gently. “I am one with the Force of others,” he says softly. “And the Force of others is with me.”

“He must have come right back to you and said,” Jyn glances at the black marks on Chirrut’s neck, “the same thing, right? The thing you were both taught to say to one another when you met, in the Temple. Even though he didn’t believe in it anymore.”

“It is tradition,” is all Chirrut says, his smile a little brighter now. If Jyn dares, she might say that there is a note of pride in Chirrut’s face now, in the way he tilts his head towards her and waits patiently for her to reach the right conclusion at last. “He always was such a stickler for tradition.”

“And you said…the same thing back to him,” Jyn tries to remember what that was, something about dancing.

“It seemed appropriate,” Chirrut’s smile turns slightly sheepish suddenly. “It remains the only time I have used the same greeting twice.”

“So it came back,” Jyn nods to his soulmark, and it doesn’t seem to matter at all that he can’t see her move. “The same words.” She frowns, uncertain. “But it was different.”

“Of course it was different,” now he is unabashedly smiling at her, and he really does seem proud of her for figuring it out. “How could it not be? _I_ was different.”

Jyn shakes her head, because she’s so close, she knows she is, but there’s still something she just can’t reconcile, something that doesn’t quite connect Chirrut’s story to her own. “But why did it fade in the first place if it was just going to come _back?_ ” she grumbles at last, exasperated.

“You think the Force knew he would come back?”

She shrugs, because that is well out of her comfort zone, and her understanding. “Isn’t it supposed to?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But Jyn,” Chirrut grins. “You think the Force made me forgive him when he did?”

That silences her for a long time.

Finally, Chirrut reaches out and takes her hand once again. “Love is never a burden, Jyn. It is a gift. And gifts must be accepted.”

Jyn takes a deep breath, and goes to find Cassian.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Alliance really did call itself a legal rebellion, and formed a government body complete with Minister of Finance and Minister of Education and so on. I don't have proof that they had internal tax laws, but what the hells else does a Minister of Finance do? 
> 
> I know the movie made it seem like Saw Gerrera never had more than a handful of angry extremists in a burrow somewhere, but multiple sources indicate that he actually once had a large, multi-celled, multi-system organization with their own X-Wings, heavy artillery, and a spy network. It was only recently that he had declined, after many failed campaigns, betrayals, and a very successful propaganda campaign by the Empire. 
> 
> Yes, I know the Alliance didn't evacuate Yavin IV for like six months post-Death Star. I find that amazingly, breathtakingly dangerous and I can't even imagine why not. So I mentally adjust that to Not Idiotic and pretend that they left right away like sane people.
> 
> Yes, I accidentally forgot that Kay was still sealed up in his backup drive last chapter and shouldn't be able to respond to any messages, so I made a hasty edit to imply that Cassian hooked up the cube with an instant messenger interface and a battery. Oops.
> 
> I know that no one picked up on it, but I giggled to myself when I wrote the Shistavanen (a dog-person) asking the Human if she was going in or out. In or out, pick one! You're blocking the door! (Yes, I have dogs. And yes, that Shistavanen was Lorga The Clanless from my One Night Stand series.). 
> 
> It actually is pretty common to keep Intelligence officers separate from the rest of the main organization, in more than one country. Draw your own conclusions as you will. 
> 
> The briefing room where Chirrut and Jyn talk is the briefing room from Return of the Jedi, where Mon Mothma lays out the plan to attack Endor and Leia realizes that Han Solo has accepted the title of General and also a suicidal mission to Endor's surface. It's just a really cool room, and hey, it's on Home One, so why not?
> 
> I don't know if Ishi Tib can see red. Let's pretend that they can't. 
> 
> Also, I'm reasonably sure this version of Chirrut and Baze's history is probably refuted somewhere in a novel or comic or whatever, but it honestly made the most sense to me. Baze gets disillusioned by the terrible occupation of Jedha, and eventually leaves in rage and disgust. Chirrut remains but is thrown out on the streets when the Guardians are forcibly disbanded, and he has to live as a blind beggar in the city that once honored him as a holy man. And then at some point, clearly Baze came back, and Chirrut accepted him. But it can't have been so simple, nor so easy for either of them. 
> 
> Anyway, here are my thoughts on the Force of Others, predestination, and soulmarks. Next chapter will be Cassian and Jyn's thoughts on them. More or less.


End file.
